Wayback Machine: see how a competitor’s website has changed

The site: Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Cost: Free. Useful for: marketing and search.

What it is

The Wayback Machine is run by the Internet Archive, a non-profit library based in San Francisco. It opened to the public in October 2001 and has captured more than a trillion web pages.

You enter a web address and a calendar shows the days on which that page was captured; pick a date to see the page as it looked then. Save Page Now, added in 2013, lets anyone archive a single page on demand and get a permanent link to the capture. For business research it works as a free history of almost any public website.

Use it for

• Tracking how a competitor’s pricing and plans have changed
• Seeing how a company’s positioning and messaging have developed
• Recovering content from a page that has been changed or taken down
• Saving evidence of a claim or price as it stands today

Companies rarely announce quiet changes to their pricing or positioning. The archive often shows exactly when they happened.

How to use it

1. Go to web.archive.org and enter the web address.
2. Press Browse History to see the calendar of captures.
3. Pick a year, then a day with a dot; blue dots mark successful captures.
4. Move between captures to compare how the page changed.
5. Use Save Page Now to capture a page you may need to cite later.

Look at specific pages, not just home pages. Pricing, about and product pages are where the useful changes usually happen. If you expect to need a page as evidence later, capture it yourself with Save Page Now today rather than hoping the crawler reaches it in time.

Example

A founder studying a software rival can enter the address of its pricing page and open captures a year or two apart. Comparing them shows when plans were renamed, prices raised or a free tier dropped, which helps explain the rival’s strategy.

Watch out for

• Captures are irregular, so there may be gaps at the moments you care about.
• Pages that depend on JavaScript or interaction may not display properly.
• Site owners can ask for their sites to be excluded.

It works well alongside Similarweb, Companies House and Meta Ad Library.