I guess it might fall under a bulletproof hosting type of setup. [1] There have been many people investigating to try and figure out who owns & operates who is actually behind archive[.]today and how they're continuously able to bypass the paywalls of paid sites, continue operating with such large infrastructure with no apparent income source.

There was quite a good article posted here on HN about someone trying to figure out those questions, but I can't seem to find it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletproof_hosting

Isn't it just a question of pretending to be a search bot ? Sites will allow google bot to bypass the paywall so stuff gets indexed.

You could easily test your hypothesis yourself. It's not gonna work very well.

The owner must have subscriptions to these services. Some paywalls are absolute and it bypasses all of them with ease. I don't see it now but there was a time when archiving a reddit page showed the username that their bot was using.