Why twitter.com Finds More Deleted Tweets Than x.com in the Wayback Machine

If you've ever searched the Wayback Machine for a tweet under its x.com URL and come up empty, only to find it archived fine under the old twitter.com address, you've run into a real gap in how the archive is indexed, not a fluke.

It comes down to one thing: the Internet Archive indexes captures by the exact domain that was crawled at the time, and for most of Twitter's history, that domain was twitter.com.

The domain migration nobody accounted for

Twitter operated at twitter.com from its founding in 2006 until mid-2023. After Elon Musk's acquisition and the rebrand to X, the company began migrating to x.com, and by 2023–2024 twitter.com started permanently redirecting there. Today, visiting any twitter.com link sends you straight to the x.com equivalent.

That redirect is invisible to a human browsing the live site, but it doesn't retroactively move anything in the Wayback Machine. The archive doesn't follow redirects when deciding how to index a capture; it stores whatever URL its crawler actually requested, at the time it requested it.

Why that creates a coverage gap

For roughly 17 years, the URL the Internet Archive's crawlers requested for any tweet, retweet, or profile was a twitter.com one. Every capture from that period, which is most of the platform's history and the majority of what's since been deleted, is indexed under twitter.com, not x.com.

A search scoped only to x.com sees a much thinner slice of the archive: whatever has been independently crawled under the new domain since the migration, plus nothing from before it. For an account that's been posting since 2015, that can mean missing the large majority of what the archive actually has.

It's the exact same gap the Internet Archive's own Wayback Machine browser extension has an open bug report for.

In February 2025, someone filed a GitHub issue against the official wayback-machine-webextension, pointing out that visiting an x.com tweet finds nothing in the extension even when that exact tweet has "been archived multiple times" under twitter.com. The fix requested, checking both domains instead of just the one currently in the address bar, is still open.

What this means if you're trying to find a deleted tweet

If you're searching manually, always try the twitter.com version of a profile or tweet URL as well as the x.com one, especially for anything posted before mid-2023. Don't assume an empty result on x.com means nothing was ever archived.

It also matters for suspended accounts: whether a tweet is recoverable has nothing to do with whether the account still exists today, and everything to do with which URL got crawled before the content disappeared.

How we handle it

We account for this when we search the archive for an account, which is part of why the results we return can differ meaningfully from tools that only check the current domain.

For the full picture on what the Wayback Machine can and can't recover, see our guide on recovering deleted tweets from the Wayback Machine.

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