Many publishers and news organizations, including the New York Times, USA Today, The Atlantic, and more, continue to block the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine from archiving journalism. According to Forbes, 23 major news sites currently block ia_archiverbot, which is the web crawler used by Internet Archive for the Wayback Machine. Forbes further states that this number is an undercount, as 241 news sites across nine countries currently block at least one of the four web crawlers used by Internet Archive.
While these organizations cite AI copyright concerns as the reason they are blocking Internet Archive's web crawlers, Ellsworth Toohey here at Boing Boing recently argued that this is misguided, as the Internet Archive isn't an AI company — it's a library that has been operating for almost 30 years. According to Forbes, as of October 2025, the Wayback Machine has archived over one trillion web pages over the last few decades, and is an invaluable resource for journalists, researchers, and citizens alike. As Toohey states, "blocking a nonprofit archivist doesn't keep your articles out of training datasets. It just means nobody can prove what your article originally said."
As the Internet Archive explains, blocking this archive cuts off "access to the public record and future accountability." The After Violence Project clearly states what's at stake if we lose the Wayback Machine, which it describes as "one of the most powerful public tools for accountability":
When corporate media locks down the public web, the ability to document state violence, track institutional change, and hold power accountable erodes with it. This is why community-led archiving is not a niche practice. It is a necessity and deserves nuanced attention in this digital age.
If you care about preserving the Wayback Machine, the good folks at the Fight For the Future organization have put together a petition to help save it. On the petition's website, they write: "The news isn't getting preserved in the Wayback Machine anymore because major media outlets are blocking it. This petition is a demand for them to stop."
The petition is addressed to the "leaders of major media outlets" and calls on them to "publicly commit to working with the Internet Archive to keep the news in the Wayback Machine." The petition continues:
Since February of this year, the New York Times has told the Internet Archive to stop its Wayback Machine from preserving the work of its journalists. Meanwhile, Wired recently reported how USA Today is publishing powerful reporting that relies on the Wayback Machine, while ironically blocking it from archiving that same reporting. And when over 100 journalists delivered a letter celebrating the Internet Archive for their respectful preservation of journalism, generating a wave of tech-viral angst, the CEO of The Atlantic weighed in but didn't commit to finding a solution. The concerns about AI that these publications cited as a reason to ban the Wayback Machine are wholly hypothetical. Journalists, and this nonprofit public good that they rely on, deserve better.
The petition then describes the importance of the Wayback Machine's archive in preserving journalistic integrity, and outlines the dangers that censorship and authoritarianism pose to a free press. We truly can't afford to lose the Wayback Machine!
Read the rest of the petition and sign it here. Learn more about how and why news organizations are blocking the archive's web crawlers in this informative Forbes article. And visit the Wayback Machine here.
Previously:
• The Internet Archive's Open Library will let you sponsor a book, paying for it to be scanned
• Here's a terrific search hack for the Internet Archive Book Images Flickr photo stream
• Wayback Machine integrated into Google search
• Internet Archive to ignore robots.txt directives
• The NYT is blocking the Internet Archive. That's a mistake.
• Internet Archive's 'Wayforward Machine' imagines web in 2046
