[1] The site has received generally positive reception for its curation, organization, and design, mostly done by readers and writers of fanfiction.

[5][6][7] The site's name was derived from a blog post by the writer Naomi Novik who, responding to FanLib's lack of interest in fostering a "fannish" community, called for the creation of "An Archive of One's Own.

Fanfiction authors from the site held an auction via Tumblr that year to raise money for Archive of Our Own, bringing in $16,729 with commissions for original works from bidders.

Anonymous Sudan (likely Russian-backed according to cybersecurity company CyberCX[15]) claimed responsibility in a Telegram post, saying it was motivated over the website's United States registration as well as its sexual and LGBT content.

[18] Archive of Our Own runs on open source code programmed almost exclusively by volunteers in the Ruby on Rails web framework.

The invitation system is a metered signup queue to protect the website from spammers and mass influxes of users.

[32] An account is not required to view posted content as long as the author has not chosen to show their works only to registered users.

[8][9] This allowance was developed as a reaction to the policies of other popular fanfiction hosts such as LiveJournal, which at one time began deleting the accounts of fic writers who wrote what the site considered to be pornography, and FanFiction.Net, which disallows numerous types of stories including any that repurpose characters originally created by authors who disapprove of fanfiction.

[3][9] According to AO3 Policy and Abuse Chair Matty Bowers, a small fraction (1,150) stories submitted to the Archive were flagged by users as "offensive".

[41]AO3 reached one million works (including stories, art pieces, and podcast fic recordings, referred to as podfics) in February 2014.

At that time, the site hosted works representing 14,353 fandoms, the largest of which were the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Supernatural, Sherlock, and Harry Potter.

[43] In 2016, about 14% of fics hosted on the site took place in an alternative universe (often shortened to AU) in which characters from a particular canon are transplanted into a different context.

The decision to delete works for alleged violations of their Terms of Service (TOS) is handled on a case-by-case basis and users (not merely accounts) can be banned for it.

In 2012, in an article entitled "Where to find the good fanfiction porn", Aja Romano and Gavia Baker-Whitelaw of The Daily Dot described Archive of Our Own as "a cornerstone of the fanfic community", writing that it hosted content that other sites like FanFiction.Net and Wattpad didn't allow and was more easily navigable than Tumblr.

[46] Time listed Archive of Our Own as one of the 50 best websites of 2013, describing it as "the most carefully curated, sanely organized, easily browsable and searchable nonprofit collection of fan fiction on the Web".

[4] According to Casey Fiesler, Shannon Morrison, and Amy S. Bruckman, Archive of Our Own is a rare example of a value-sensitive design that was developed and coded by its target audience, namely writers and readers of fanfiction.

[50] Users called for a boycott against Xiao Zhan, his fans, endorsed products, luxury brands, and other Chinese celebrities involved with the actor.

[51][52] On 13 December 2022, the site was indexed by the German Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons due to "child pornography content", temporarily removing it from Google search results.