241 News Sites Blocked the Internet Archive — And Nobody Can Find 2025 Anymore
The New York Times, The Guardian, and 239 other publishers are torching 30 years of web history to fight an AI war the Internet Archive didn’t start.
241 news sites across 9 countries now block the Wayback Machine. 93% block at least two of its four crawlers. Wikipedia links to 2.6 million archived news articles that may vanish. The Internet Archive has preserved over 1 trillion web pages since the mid-1990s. And publishers are burning it all down because they’re mad at OpenAI.
Look, the EFF just put out a piece that’s basically a fire alarm for the entire internet’s memory. And nobody’s paying attention because everyone’s too busy arguing about whether AI training is fair use. Meanwhile, the actual library is getting locked out.
The Numbers That Matter
| Stat | Number |
|---|
| News sites blocking Internet Archive | 241 across 9 countries |
| Sites also blocking Common Crawl | 240 of 241 (99.6%) |
| Sites blocking 2+ Archive crawlers | 226 (93%) |
| Gannett properties blocking | 210 of their total sites |
| Wikipedia links to archived news | 2.6 million across 249 languages |
| Total Wayback Machine pages | 1+ trillion |
| Years of preservation at risk | ~30 |
| U.S.-based blocking sites | 76% of total |
