WebCite is an intermittently available archive site, originally designed to digitally preserve scientific and educationally important material on the web by taking snapshots of Internet contents as they existed at the time when a blogger or a scholar cited or quoted from it.

The preservation service enabled verifiability of claims supported by the cited sources even when the original web pages are being revised, removed, or disappear for other reasons, an effect known as link rot.

Conceived in 1997 by Gunther Eysenbach, WebCite was publicly described the following year when an article on Internet quality control declared that such a service could also measure the citation impact of web pages.

WebCite also offered interfaces to scholarly journals and publishers to automate the archiving of cited links.

WebCite ran a fund-raising campaign using FundRazr from January 2013 with a target of $22,500, a sum which its operators stated was needed to maintain and modernize the service beyond the end of 2013.

[1] WebCite maintained the legal position that its archiving activities[4] are allowed by the copyright doctrines of fair use and implied license.

[1] To support the fair use argument, WebCite noted that its archived copies are transformative, socially valuable for academic research, and not harmful to the market value of any copyrighted work.