What is Archive-It?
Archive-It is a web archiving crawler operated by Internet Archive that preserves copies of web pages for long-term digital preservation and historical record-keeping. It is commonly used by libraries, museums, universities, and other institutions to create and maintain collections of archived web content. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when Archive-It visits your website.
Category
| Example User Agent | alaska_state_library_https://archive-it.org/organizations/305 |
| Operated By | Internet Archive |
| Source | Official Website |
| Triggered By | Automated crawl |
| Used for AI Model Training | Not expected |
| Affects AI Chat & Search Visibility | Not directly |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
Why Is Archive-It Visiting My Website?
Archive-It is preserving your pages as part of a historical record. It returns periodically so the archive can capture how your content changes over time.
Should I Block Archive-It?
Rarely. Archive-It preserves snapshots of your pages through redesigns, migrations, and broken links. Blocking it prevents future captures but does not remove existing snapshots. To remove those, you must contact the archive directly. For context, 7% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Archive-It.
How Do I Block Archive-It Using Robots.txt?
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block Archive-It from accessing your website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all archivers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: Archive-It # https://knownagents.com/agents/archive-it
Disallow: /Insights for Archive-It
As of October 30, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Compliance
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Archive-It Traffic
Frequently Asked Questions
What Traffic Patterns Should I Expect From Archive-It?
Archive-It periodically fetches complete pages rather than checking metadata alone. Visit frequency typically rises with your site's popularity and update cadence.
Does Archive-It Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Archive-It is expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step if you want to block it. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether Archive-It respects it.
Is Archive-It Used for AI Model Training?
Not ordinarily. Archive-It is not categorized as an AI training scraper or data provider, so AI model training is not its expected purpose.
Does Blocking Archive-It Affect AI Search or Citations?
Not directly. Archive-It's expected purpose is not to supply an AI search index or retrieve pages for AI-generated answers.
Does Archive-It Access Private Content?
No. Archive-It archives only what an anonymous visitor can see. Anything public at crawl time may remain available in its archive long after you remove it from your site.
How Can I Verify a Request From Archive-It?
Agent Analytics tracks Archive-It visits in real time. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "Archive-It". Look for a page and its embedded assets being fetched again after a long interval. Because Archive-It does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.
How Is Archive-It Different From Other Internet Archive Agents?
Internet Archive operates separate agents for different purposes, so each agent should be evaluated and controlled independently.
- archive.org_bot: archive.org_bot is the Internet Archive's web crawler for the Wayback Machine, systematically crawling and preserving publicly accessible web pages for historical record …
- heritrix: heritrix is an archiver operated by Internet Archive.
- ia_archiver: ia_archiver is an archiver operated by Internet Archive.
- ia_archiver-web.archive.org: ia_archiver-web.archive.org is an archiver operated by Internet Archive.
- Internet Archive: Internet Archive is an archiver operated by Internet Archive.