As publishers block the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for unfounded concerns over AI scraping, hundreds of journalists have signed a public letter supporting the Wayback Machine and the importance of preserving the online historical record. Below, Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, shares a message of thanks to the journalism community for standing up for web preservation, accountability, and access to the public record.

Journalists who would like to add their names can sign the letter here, and members of the public can sign the broader support letter here.

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Dear colleagues,

On behalf of all of us at the Internet Archive, I want to thank you.

Your support for the Wayback Machine sends a clear message: preserving the record matters.

For thirty years, the Wayback Machine has worked in the background, preserving more than 1 trillion web pages so that reporting doesn’t simply vanish with the next site redesign or corporate decision. Today, more than 100 news articles every month reference, cite, or rely on material preserved by the Wayback Machine to verify claims, recover deleted information, or provide historical context.

Where previous generations could walk into a newsroom morgue or a local library archive, today’s journalists increasingly rely on digital preservation to trace accountability and verify claims that might otherwise be lost. When a source disappears, when a statement is rewritten, when a page is taken down, the ability to recover that record is not a luxury. 

The stakes are not hypothetical. A Pew Research Center study from 2024 found that 38% of webpages from a decade ago are no longer accessible, and about 25% of pages sampled across the decade have disappeared entirely. But that’s not the whole story. New analysis by Internet Archive data scientist Sawood Alam found that the Wayback Machine has rescued roughly 15% of those otherwise lost pages, preserving reporting and historical evidence that would simply no longer exist online.

We are especially grateful that you recognized the care with which we approach this work. We are your partners in preservation. We build systems designed for people, not bulk extraction; we monitor our services to manage abusive access; and we actively collaborate with publishers and newsrooms to ensure their work is preserved with integrity.

Importantly, recent reporting has also underscored a key reality of this debate. As journalist Andrew Deck reported in Marketplace Tech, many publishers blocking the Wayback Machine appear to be acting preemptively out of concern over AI scraping rather than evidence of misuse. “None of the publishers were able to point to a particular AI company or other kinds of direct evidence that their content had already been scraped by the Wayback Machine,” Deck wrote.

At a time when the pressures on journalism are mounting—from economic shifts to the rapid evolution of AI—your support sends a clear message: preserving the public record is not optional. It is essential infrastructure for a functioning democracy.

We remain committed to the important task of preserving the web. And we are deeply encouraged to know that so many of you stand with us in defending that work.

With gratitude,

Mark Graham
Director, Wayback Machine
Internet Archive