The Wayback Machine is a project of the Internet Archive. It sends out web crawlers to take snapshots of the internet, creating a digital library of web pages. But now, some news publications are blocking its crawlers over concerns that AI companies will access the Wayback Machine’s publicly available archive and then train their AI models with the content.Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes talked about this with Andrew Deck at Harvard's Nieman Lab.
Apr 21, 2026
In efforts to block AI companies' web crawlers, publishers are also not allowing Wayback Machine to take snapshots of their content, fearing that it could later be scraped from the pages of the archiving library.

adventtr/Getty Images
The Wayback Machine is a project of the Internet Archive. It sends out web crawlers to take snapshots of the internet, creating a digital library of web pages. But now, some news publications are blocking its crawlers over concerns that AI companies will access the Wayback Machine’s publicly available archive and then train their AI models with the content.
Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes talked about this with Andrew Deck at Harvard's Nieman Lab.
“News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns” from Nieman Lab
“The Internet's Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril” from Wired
| # | Наименование новости | Тональность | Информативность | Дата публикации |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Study finds AI is making the internet more artificially happy | 0 | 7 | 19-05-2026 |
| 2 | Digital archiving and the global memory shortage | 0 | 7 | 03-03-2026 |
| 3 | AI makes it easier to code websites — including ones that scam consumers | 0 | 7 | 23-02-2026 |
| 4 | Google search gets an AI makeover | 0 | 5 | 22-05-2026 |
| 5 | Welcome to the 'infocalypse' | -2 | 6 | 21-01-2026 |
| 6 | Google will let websites opt-out of AI Mode & Overviews in Search | 0 | 5 | 03-06-2026 |
| 7 | A bill that bans kids from using AI chatbots is gaining momentum | 0 | 7 | 04-05-2026 |
| 8 | Anti-AI data center sentiment is becoming a political issue | 0 | 7 | 23-04-2026 |
| 9 | AI bots are collecting debts — or at least trying to | 0 | 5 | 03-06-2026 |
| 10 | The ethics of using AI to immortalize the dead | 0 | 7 | 18-03-2026 |