Google will no longer keep backups of websites. According to Google, this is no longer necessary as the reliability of websites has increased.

Google confirms the discontinuation of cached websites via Since this happens much less often than before, Google says it is no longer necessary to keep a copy of every website. Google has been systematically removing cached links since December and now they seem to have disappeared for good.

Backup from the Internet

To collect cached versions of web pages, Google deployed 24/7 web crawlers on the World Wide Web. These “digital spiders” created backup copies of websites at very regular intervals so that if a website temporarily went down, Google could still display the most current version. Initially, the cached links consisted only of text versions of web pages, but over the years, Google began to cache media files as well. These cached links could also be useful for SEO optimization.

Retiring the website cache seems to be primarily a business decision. Keeping all those cached web pages costs Google petaybytes of data for which it returns little to nothing. It can now share everything on its servers for other purposes, such as training its generative AI models, which also involve large amounts of data.