NiemanLab: “Between May and October 2025, homepage snapshots fell by 87% across 100 news publications. ..The Wayback Machine, an initiative from the nonprofit Internet Archive, has been archiving the webpages of news outlets — alongside millions of other websites — for nearly three decades. Earlier this month, it announced that it will soon archive its trillionth web page. The Internet Archive has long stressed the importance of archiving homepages, particularly to fact-check politicians’ claims. In 2018, for instance, when Donald Trump accused Google of failing to promote his State of the Union address on its homepage, Google used the Wayback Machine’s archive of its homepage to disprove the statement. “[Google’s] job isn’t to make copies of the homepage every 10 minutes,” Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine, said at the time. “Ours is.” But a Nieman Lab analysis shows that the Wayback Machine’s snapshots of news outlets’ homepages have plummeted in recent months. Between January 1 and May 15, 2025, the Wayback Machine shows a total of 1.2 million snapshots collected from 100 major news sites’ homepages. Between May 17 and October 1, 2025, it shows 148,628 snapshots from those same 100 sites — a decline of 87%. (You can see our data here.) While our analysis focused on news sites, they’re not the only URLs impacted. We documented a similarly large decrease in the number of snapshots available of federal government website homepages after May 16, during a period when the Trump administration has taken down pages on government sites and made changes, often without disclosure, otherwise known as “stealth editing.”…”