Get one Wayback Machine snapshot per year of any website with one curl (CDX API, no key)

Disclosure: I built the Apify Actor linked at the end and charge per result. The raw endpoints below are free and need no key.

Want to see how a site evolved, or build a yearly timeline of a page? The Internet Archive's CDX server can collapse captures by timestamp prefix.

One successful capture per year

curl -s "https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=example.com&output=json&fl=timestamp,statuscode&collapse=timestamp:4&filter=statuscode:200&limit=4"

collapse=timestamp:4 keeps one row per distinct first 4 characters of the timestamp (the year). Checked 2026-11-01, the first rows were 20020120142510, 20030207055228, 20040105045515 and 20050101025054.

Open any of them at https://web.archive.org/web/<timestamp>/<url>.

The most recent capture

curl -s "https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=example.com&output=json&fl=timestamp&limit=-1"

A negative limit returns the last rows instead of the first. Checked 2026-11-01: it returned 20261101041731.

Gotchas

• Timestamps are YYYYMMDDhhmmss, UTC.
• Use collapse=timestamp:6 for monthly, timestamp:8 for daily.
• Heavy domain-wide queries can time out; keep them narrow and rate-limit yourself.

Hosted version

If you'd rather not script it, I packaged this as an Apify Actor (pay per result, no subscription): https://apify.com/northgrid-data/wayback-snapshots-cdx

Feedback welcome in the Actor's issues.