archiveis.com

The web is not permanent.

Links rot. Paywalls rise. Platforms die. A technical directory and explainer for preserving pages and citations.

The Fragility of Digital Records

According to a 2024 Pew Research study, 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later. This phenomenon, known as Link Rot, threatens the integrity of academic citations, legal evidence, and the historical record.

When you bookmark a URL, you are saving a pointer to a server, not the content itself. If that server is reconfigured, the business folds, or the author deletes the post, the context is lost forever.

Diagram showing 38% decay of hyperlinked content over a decade
Fig 1. Visualizing the decade decay rate based on Pew findings.

Multi-Archive Query

Check multiple archives simultaneously for a specific URL.

Core Archival Infrastructure

Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive's flagship project. Over 866 billion pages saved. Best for historical breadth, but struggles with modern JavaScript SPAs and strict robots.txt blocks.

archive.today

A privately run, opaque, but highly effective archive. It executes JavaScript, renders pages as a browser would, and ignores robots.txt. Crucial for capturing paywalled or heavily scripted content.

Perma.cc

Built by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. The standard for legal and academic citation. Allows authenticated users to create permanent records of citations that cannot be altered.

Webrecorder (Conifer)

High-fidelity, user-driven archiving. Instead of sending a crawler, it captures the exact network traffic and state as you navigate a page in your browser. Essential for complex web apps.

Technical Concepts

Understanding how archiving works requires understanding the underlying protocols and formats.