Collector live 47 outlets – articles saved – versions – changes recorded

Guide · Updated 13 November 2026

How to see an earlier version of a news article

If a story has changed and you want to read it as it was, these are the places to look, roughly in order of how often they work.

Start with the Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine holds saved copies of a great many news pages.

  • Paste the article's full address into the search box.
  • A calendar shows the dates on which the page was saved. Pick one from before the change you are interested in.
  • If the address returns nothing, try it without anything after a question mark, and with and without "www.".

Coverage is uneven. Big outlets' front pages are saved often; individual articles may have been saved once, or never.

Use the link inside Google's results

Google retired its own "cached" copies of pages in 2024. In September 2024 it added links to the Wayback Machine instead: click the three dots beside a search result to open "About this result", then choose "More about this page" to find a link to earlier versions. Google notes the link won't appear for every page, and the menu wording may have changed since.

Try archive.today

archive.today keeps copies that people chose to save. Search it for the article's address. If a story was controversial, someone may well have saved it.

Look where the story was copied

  • Social posts and link previews often keep the original headline and opening line long after the article changes.
  • Feed readers and email newsletters store what they received when the story first went out.
  • Syndicated copies. Wire stories and articles shared through news apps and partner sites are sometimes copied before an edit and not updated afterwards.

Treat these as clues rather than proof. A copy can be edited too, and a social headline may never have matched the article.

Check NewsFacts

If the story is from an outlet we follow, we may have saved its versions automatically from the time it was published. Paste the address here to find out. Where a change has been reviewed and published, the record shows the changed passages word by word.

When nothing turns up

Sometimes no copy of the earlier version exists anywhere. You can still ask the outlet directly: many newsrooms will tell you what changed and why if you ask politely and give the article's address. And next time a story matters to you, save your own copy before it has a chance to change.