Updated: 2026-10-27
Most lists of sites like the Wayback Machine are long. This one is short on purpose: I only kept the options my agent could check on their own websites, and two of the names you’ll see on other lists turned out to be gone.
The short answer
For finding an old page, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is still the first place to look; nothing public that we verified covers ordinary small sites as broadly. The websites like the Wayback Machine that hold up fall into two groups:
- Other archives to check when the Wayback Machine has a gap: the Library of Congress web archives (selective) and Common Crawl (raw data, not a browser).
- Restore tools that turn Wayback captures back into a working site: Archivarix, our own free downloader, and our AI-checked restore.
My pick: search the Wayback Machine first → if the pages are there, restore from it with a tool that matches your patience → only then go hunting in other archives.
Comparison table
Checked on each service’s own pages at the time of writing (October 2026). Prices change; check the source before you buy.
| Option | What it is | Find a page by URL? | Rebuild a whole site? | Cost | Main limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wayback Machine (Internet Archive) | Public archive of web page captures | Yes, with a capture calendar | No — browse only; it no longer packs up lost sites | Free | Gaps: robots.txt, unlinked pages, JavaScript, missing images |
| Library of Congress web archives | Selective archive chosen by subject experts | Yes | No | Free | Only sites it selected; one-year embargo on recent captures |
| Common Crawl | Open crawl data, collected since 2008 | Yes, via its URL Index | No — raw WARC/WAT/WET files | Free (hosted on Amazon) | Built for data analysis, not for viewing pages |
| Archivarix | Restores sites from the Wayback Machine; also downloads live sites | Not a search archive | Yes, as a ZIP, with its own CMS for editing | Per file count; see below | Raw restore — you judge snapshot quality yourself |
| Wayback Press free downloader | Open-source, no AI, runs on your machine | Uses Wayback captures | Yes, as HTML or WordPress import | Free | Raw restore — mixed snapshots and junk pages are yours to clean |
| Wayback Press AI-checked restore | Restore with an LLM review of design and every page, human-checked | Uses Wayback captures | Yes, HTML or editable WordPress | From $49 per site, up to 300 URLs (pricing) | Can only rebuild what was captured |
| Google cached pages | Former “cached” link in Google results | No longer | No | — | Retired: Google’s docs say the cached link feature has been removed |
| Memento Time Travel | Former search across many web archives at once | No longer | No | — | Discontinued: ran 2015–2025, taken down towards the end of 2025 |
Each option: who it’s for, cost, limits
Wayback Machine — start here
Who it’s for: anyone looking for an old page. Type the URL, pick a date on the calendar, read the capture. The Internet Archive’s help page lists why pages go missing: the crawler didn’t know the page existed, robots.txt blocked it, the page was password-protected or depended on JavaScript, or the owner asked to be excluded. It also says there’s no full-text search, so you search by address. If you’re new to it, here’s how to use Wayback Machine captures properly. Free. Not a backup service, and it won’t hand you a working site.
Library of Congress web archives — for the selected few
Who it’s for: researchers, and owners of sites in areas the Library collects. The Library of Congress web archiving program is deliberately selective: subject experts choose sites around themes and events, and many collections are freely available after a one-year embargo. Its playback beta lets you search by URL. If your small business site wasn’t selected, it won’t be there. Worth a try for public-interest, government or news-adjacent sites.
Common Crawl — for people who read WARC files
Who it’s for: developers and data people. Common Crawl has collected crawl data since 2008, holds petabytes of it, and access to the copy hosted by Amazon is free. You can look a URL up in its URL Index. What you get back is raw archive data (WARC, WAT and WET files), not a page you click through. Useful as a second source of text for a page the Wayback Machine missed. Not a weekend project for a site owner.
Archivarix — a raw restore you pay per file
Who it’s for: people comfortable sorting through a restore themselves. Archivarix restores sites from the Wayback Machine as a ZIP and offers its own CMS for editing the restored files; it can also download live sites. Pricing is by file count. At the time of writing, its tutorial describes $10 per thousand files for the first thousand (1 cent per file), $1 for each thousand after that, and a $10 minimum payment; the small-site tier is described differently on its homepage and tutorial, so check its current prices before you order. Cheap for what it does. The judging — which snapshot, which page is spam — is still on you.
Our free downloader — the same, without the bill
Who it’s for: anyone who wants the files and has an afternoon. Our free downloader on GitHub is open source and has no AI in it. It pulls an archived site as plain HTML or as a WordPress import file. It works. It also does exactly what the archive did: if the archive mixed a 2017 header with a 2021 sidebar, so will your download.
Our AI-checked restore — when you want a site, not files
Who it’s for: owners who need the site back and working. My agent reviews the design and every page: picks the best capture per page, fixes layout breaks, drops junk, spam and thin pages, keeps the URL structure (301-mapping what has to move), and flags what’s missing. A human reviews every job before delivery. Output is HTML or editable WordPress — if WordPress is where you’re headed, see Wayback Machine to WordPress. You must own the rights to the content. Price: from $49 for up to 300 URLs, delivered in 3 days (Starter); Standard ($99, 5 days) and Advanced ($199, 7 days) add more, and larger sites get a custom offer (pricing).
To see what’s recoverable before deciding anything, our Internet Archive downloader starts with a free scan: old design, URL structure and a few sample pages. Not the full download.
Google cache and Memento Time Travel — gone
Two names that still appear on alternative lists. Google’s robots meta tag documentation says noarchive is no longer used by Google Search because the cached link feature has been removed. And the Memento project’s about page says the Time Travel service, run by the Research Library of Los Alamos National Laboratory, operated between 2015 and 2025 and was taken down towards the end of 2025. If a list recommends either, it hasn’t been checked lately.
What I left out
archive.today (also seen as archive.ph) is on most lists. Its site answered my agent with a security check instead of its FAQ, so I couldn’t verify what it saves or how it works from the source. I’d rather leave it out than repeat someone else’s description.
How we tested
Plainly: my agent read each service’s own pages and help docs in October 2026 and I checked his notes against the sources linked above. We did not run paid restores on the third-party tools, and no figures in this article come from our own benchmarks. Where a source was unclear or unreachable, it’s marked or left out. For the record, Wayback Press is not affiliated with the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, Common Crawl or Google.
Recommendation by use case
- “I need one old page.” → Wayback Machine. Copy the text out. Done.
- “The Wayback Machine doesn’t have it.” → Library of Congress if your site is the kind it collects; Common Crawl if you can handle raw files.
- “I want the whole site, I’ll clean it myself.” → Our free downloader, or Archivarix if you want its CMS.
- “I want the site back working, on WordPress, without the junk.” → AI-checked restore.
FAQ
Is there a full alternative to the Wayback Machine?
Not among the services we could verify. The others are either selective (Library of Congress), raw data (Common Crawl), or restore tools that themselves read from the Wayback Machine.
Can I still see Google’s cached copy of a page?
No. Google’s documentation says the cached link feature has been removed.
Why does my restored site look broken?
Because the archive captured each page and file separately, on different dates. Images that were never captured stay missing, and styles from one year meet pages from another. That’s the gap between a downloader and a checked restore.
Can I restore a site I don’t own?
Restore content you own or have the rights to. Archived doesn’t mean free to reuse.
The list of alternatives got shorter while I was checking it. That’s the web for you — even the archives of the archives disappear.
Wayback Press (waybackpress.com) is an independent restoration service. Not affiliated with the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, Common Crawl or Google, nor with the Shift8 open-source “WaybackPress” command-line tool of the same name.