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Internet Archive - Archive-It

Internet Archive’s Archive-It service preserves publicly accessible web pages for the historical record.
Archive-ItArchive-It
Archiver

What is Internet Archive - Archive-It?

Libraries, archives, and other institutions use Archive-It to preserve selected parts of the web. An Archive-It partner chooses seed URLs, defines crawl scope, and runs collections on its own schedule. The crawler then saves in-scope pages and the files needed to replay them later.

Archive-It's Standard crawling technology uses Heritrix to follow and download linked documents. Brozzler takes a browser-based approach, rendering and interacting with a page before writing the captured traffic into archive files. A Brozzler visit can therefore look like a browser loading HTML and its embedded resources.

Repeated visits usually mean that the collecting institution ran the seed again to record changes. A complete capture depends on more than the main document. Denied stylesheets, images, or scripts can leave a preserved page difficult to replay even when its HTML was saved.

This is a preservation service, not a generative AI crawler. An Archive-It copy may remain available long after the live page changes, but the capture itself does not show that an AI company indexed or trained on the page. Official help material uses archive.org_bot for robots rules, while full request strings may also contain Archive-It or special_archiver.

Indirectly relevant

Is Internet Archive - Archive-It relevant for AI search?

Indirectly. Internet Archive - Archive-It has no AI product of its own, but its output can end up in the systems that AI answers draw on.

Internet Archive - Archive-It captures snapshots of pages and stores them, usually for good. Public archives are a common ingredient in AI training datasets, and AI tools sometimes cite an archived version when the live page is gone. What it captures today can still be describing your brand years from now.

How to handle Internet Archive - Archive-It

If possible, identify the institution collecting the site before blocking it. A path exclusion can remove the page itself or a dependency needed for faithful replay, so coordinate changes with the collection partner when the archive is intentional.

Archive-It documents this robots.txt identity:

User-agent: archive.org_bot
Disallow: /

Compliance is partial and configurable. The Standard crawler respects exclusions and crawl delays by default. Brozzler respects most exclusions, but ignores them for embedded documents and ignores crawl delays by default. A partner can also apply an Ignore Robots.txt scope rule. Keep private material behind authentication or another access control rather than relying on this file.

Examples

  • A state library schedules a local election site as a seed, and `archive.org_bot` returns during each collection run to preserve new versions.
  • A site owner blocks a directory for the Standard crawler but still sees Brozzler fetch an embedded image needed by an otherwise in-scope page.

Frequently asked questions about Internet Archive - Archive-It

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

Archive-It partners choose the seed URLs, crawl scope, and schedule for their collections.

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