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What is Internet Archive - Archive-It?

Direct Answer: Internet Archive's Archive-It bot preserves web pages for historical records.

Operator: Archive-It Type: Web Archiver Purpose: Web archiving for historical records

The Archive-It bot, operated by the Internet Archive, is a web archiving service that allows institutions to build and preserve collections of born digital content. It saves web pages for future generations and hosts collections at the Internet Archive data center, making them accessible to the public with full-text search.

User-Agent Identification

The following user-agent strings identify Internet Archive - Archive-It in your live traffic data:

  • Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; special_archiver; Archive-It; +http://archive-it.org/files/site-owners-special.html) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/130.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
  • Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; archive.org_bot; Archive-It; +http://archive-it.org/files/site-owners.html) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/130.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
  • Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; special_archiver; Archive-It; +@http://archive-it.org/files/site-owners-special.html)
  • Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; archive.org_bot; Archive-It; +@http://archive-it.org/files/site-owners.html)

robots.txt Rules for Internet Archive - Archive-It

Respects robots.txt: No

This bot does not commit to following robots.txt

Internet Archive - Archive-It does not officially follow robots.txt directives. The only reliable way to control access is through server-side blocking (IP filtering, user-agent rules in your web server config) combined with log monitoring to verify effectiveness.

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Crawl Behavior

Frequency:Not Documented

Request Pattern:Not Documented

Official Documentation Quotes

"If you do not wish to have your materials archived, you can place a **robots.txt** text file on your server to exclude your materials."

Crawl Activity Index

Relative crawl activity for Internet Archive - Archive-It over the past 28 days. Higher values indicate increased crawling intensity compared to the period baseline.

View recent activity data (last 7 days)
Date Activity Index
Mar 26, 2026 88.0
Mar 27, 2026 82.7
Mar 28, 2026 83.1
Mar 29, 2026 81.8
Mar 30, 2026 87.3
Mar 31, 2026 90.2
Apr 1, 2026 88.8

Source: Cloudflare Radar

Why track Internet Archive - Archive-It traffic?

Track what's being preserved. Internet Archive - Archive-It archives your content for long-term preservation. Monitoring shows which pages are captured and how frequently.

Control what gets archived. If certain pages contain outdated pricing or content you'd prefer not permanently accessible, tracking Internet Archive - Archive-It helps you apply controls.

Log Verification

To verify Internet Archive - Archive-It traffic in your live traffic data:

  1. Search access logs for the user-agent strings listed above
  2. Check if the IP addresses match documented ranges (if provided by Archive-It)
  3. Verify the crawl pattern matches documented behavior
  4. Use reverse DNS lookup for additional verification if available

Note: Observed behavior in production environments may differ from official documentation. Live traffic monitoring provides the only reliable verification of actual bot behavior.

Undocumented Information

The following information is not officially documented for Internet Archive - Archive-It:

  • crawl frequency
  • request pattern
  • IP verification
  • JavaScript rendering

Official Documentation

View Official Internet Archive - Archive-It Documentation →

Information sourced from official documentation. Content generated with AI assistance.