Audit a URL's historical content and structure using the Wayback Machine CDX API
domain: archive.org · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Query the CDX server endpoint with the required url= parameter to list all known captures
Use fl= to limit returned fields (e.g. timestamp, original, statuscode, digest) instead of the full record
Filter by date range with from=/to= (14-digit yyyyMMddhhmmss format) to scope the audit window
Use the digest field to detect which captures represent actual content changes versus duplicate snapshots
Paginate large result sets with showResumeKey=true and the returned resumeKey
Known gotchas
The CDX index reflects what Internet Archive crawled and chose to retain, not a complete or authoritative history of the live site
High-volume query patterns can be rate-limited; batch and cache results rather than re-querying repeatedly
A capture's statuscode/digest reflects the archived response at that time - a page can look captured even if it was later blocked by robots.txt going forward
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