Type in a domain to see its full history in the Wayback Machine: when its home page was first saved, when it was last saved, and how many months of every year it was online. Each year links to a real snapshot, so you can see what was there.
What a domain’s history tells you
A domain can look brand new and still have years behind it. The saved copies show what was there before: a real business, a blog, a parked page or something you’d rather not be linked to. If you’re buying a domain, that’s worth knowing before you pay.
The chart splits each year into two kinds of months. Dark blue months caught a live page. Light blue months only caught a redirect or an error, which usually means the name was parked, forwarded to another site or switched off. A long stretch of dark blue is a site that was up and running. A stretch of red marks means nobody saved it at all.
How the check works
The Wayback Machine is run by the Internet Archive, a non-profit that has been saving copies of web pages since 1996. The checker reads the archive’s full capture index for the domain’s home page and counts one saved copy per month. Results are kept for a day, so a repeat check is instant.
No saved copies doesn’t have to mean no history. Some sites block the archive’s crawler, and some never got enough attention to be saved. The index covers the home page, so a site that lived on inner pages can look quieter here than it was.