Internet Archive Glossary

The digital library and web archive whose corpus helps researchers study how the web changes over time, including the rise of AI-generated sites.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library best known for the Wayback Machine, which preserves snapshots of websites over time. For the Dictionary, it matters not only as a public good but as measurement infrastructure. If researchers want to know how the web changed, they need historical copies of the web.

The AI-writing cluster refers to research using a representative sample of websites collected through the Wayback Machine to estimate the growth of AI-generated and AI-assisted text online. The Archive therefore becomes part of the evidence trail for claims about the Zombie Internet: a way to compare how the web changes across time.

The institution also represents a broader point. In an era of generated abundance, durable public archives become more valuable, not less. They are part of the memory layer of the internet.

See also

• Zombie Internet
• AI Writing
• Provenance

Source

• Hanley et al., “The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet”, 14 April 2026.

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