Access Patterns of Robots and Humans in Web Archives

We analyzed human and robot access patterns in web archives using Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and Portuguese Web Archive access logs from 2012 and 2019. We classified user sessions as human or robot based on browsing behavior and then analyzed them to identify navigation patterns and temporal preferences. The study found that robots dominated archive traffic, accounting for up to 98% of requests, while their access patterns became more varied over time. Both humans and robots showed a strong preference for recently archived web pages.