How to Remove Your Website from the Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine, operated by the Internet Archive, stores historical versions of websites, often going back decades. While useful for research or restoration, sometimes there's a need to remove archived content for privacy, legal, or brand-related reasons.

This article outlines the methods available to remove your website, or parts of it, from the Wayback Machine.

Preventing Future Archiving with robots.txt

The Wayback Machine respects the robots.txt protocol. By placing a simple rule in the file on your server, you can prevent it from archiving any future content.

Add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

This blocks the Internet Archive’s crawler (ia_archiver) from storing new snapshots of your site. However, this does not affect content that has already been archived.

Requesting the Removal of Archived Pages

To remove content that has already been stored in the Wayback Machine, you’ll need to contact the Internet Archive directly.

Contact Information:

Email: info@archive.org

What to include:

• The domain or specific URLs you want removed

• A clear request to remove archived content

• A request to prevent future archiving (optional but recommended)

• Proof of ownership (such as a DNS record or email from a domain-based address)

Example message:

Subject: Request for removal of archived content

Hello,
I am the owner of yourdomain.com and would like to request the removal of all archived versions of this site from the Wayback Machine.
Please also block future archiving.

I can provide verification of ownership if required.

Thank you.

If your request is accepted, the archived content will become inaccessible, and future snapshots will be blocked.

Removing Copyrighted Material

If someone has archived content that includes copyrighted material you own and did not authorize its publication, you may submit a DMCA takedown notice.

This notice should also be sent to info@archive.org and should clearly state:

• Which copyrighted work is being used

• Where it appears in the archive

• Your legal basis for the claim

Only submit DMCA notices if you are confident in your claim. Misuse of this process may have legal consequences.

Targeting Specific Content for Removal

You can request removal of:

• Entire domains

• Subdomains (such as blog.example.com)

• Individual URLs (such as example.com/old-page.html)

Be as specific as possible to avoid unintended removal of content you want to keep available.

What Happens After Your Request

Once approved:

• The selected content is no longer accessible via the Wayback Machine

• The site or URL will no longer appear in archive.org results

• Future crawls can be blocked with robots.txt or by explicit request

Keep in mind that this process only affects archive.org. Other archiving services or cached copies may still exist elsewhere.

Final Thoughts

Removing content from the Wayback Machine is possible, but it requires clear communication and, ideally, proof of ownership. Whether you’re protecting privacy, correcting mistakes, or managing a brand change, these methods provide a reasonable way to control how your site's history is displayed online.

If your goal is to recover old versions instead of removing them, Smartial.net offers free tools that help extract, compare, and audit archived websites using the Wayback Machine.

Let us know if you need help with that.