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The Wayback Machine's automated crawlers, also known as web crawlers or spiders, work by systematically browsing the web to capture and archive web pages. Here's a simplified breakdown of how they operate:

Crawling: The crawlers start by visiting a list of known web pages and follow links on those pages to discover new pages. This process continues recursively, allowing the crawlers to explore a vast number of websites.

Capturing: When a crawler visits a web page, it takes a snapshot of the page, capturing its content, images, and other elements as they appear at that moment.

Indexing: The captured snapshots are then indexed and stored in the Wayback Machine's database, making them searchable and accessible to users.

Respecting Robots.txt: The crawlers respect the robots exclusion standard (robots.txt) on websites, which tells them which parts of the site should not be crawled or archived.

This process allows the Wayback Machine to build a comprehensive archive of the web, preserving digital content for future access.