Guide · Updated 13 November 2026

How to save a web page as evidence

If a news article, post or web page might change or disappear and you may need to show what it said, save it now, in more than one way. This guide covers the free methods and what each one can and can't prove.

This is general information, not legal advice. If you expect to use a page in a legal matter, ask a lawyer early: they may want it captured a particular way.

Save it to a public archive

A copy held by an independent archive is stronger than one you made yourself, because you couldn't have edited it.

• Wayback Machine. Go to web.archive.org/save, paste the address and save. Write down the archive address it returns, which contains the date and time of the capture.
• archive.today. At archive.ph, paste the address and save. It keeps a copy and a screenshot of the page as it looked.

Use both if the page matters. Archives occasionally fail to capture a page properly, and some sites block one archive but not the other. Open each saved copy to check that it actually shows the content.

Make your own copies too

• Print to PDF from your browser with headers and footers turned on, so the address and the date print on each page.
• Take full-page screenshots that include the address bar and your device's clock if you can.
• Keep notes: the address, the date and time, and how you found the page.

Store the files somewhere you won't change them, and don't edit, crop or rename them in ways that could raise questions later.

What these copies can and can't show

Courts in the United States have treated Wayback Machine captures differently. Some have accepted them readily; others have required the Internet Archive to confirm, in a signed statement, that a printout matches its records, or have refused them. The Internet Archive says it attested to 450 such affidavits in 2023, and its legal policy charges a fee for them and asks lawyers to try other routes first.

Even then, the Archive's statement only confirms that the printout matches what it holds, not on its own that the page looked that way to everyone at that moment. Your own screenshots and PDFs are easier to dispute still, because they are easier to alter. That is why capturing a page in several independent ways is worth the extra minute.

For important or ongoing matters

Companies sell web-capture services designed for litigation, which record how and when a page was collected. Lawyers who handle these cases regularly will know which their courts accept.

How NewsFacts keeps its own record

For the outlets we follow, our collector saves each version of a story automatically, keeps the page it was read from, and publishes a daily list of fingerprints anchored with an independent public timestamp, so anyone can check that a version existed by a given date. How our daily proofs work. If the story you care about is from one of those outlets, check whether we have it.