Archaeopteryx was named by Meyer (1861). It is the type genus of Archaeopterygidae, Archaeopteryginae.

It was corrected as Archeopteryx by Lambrecht (1933).

It was assigned to Saururae by Marsh (1880); to Saururae by Zittel (1890); to Archaeornithes by Gadow (1898); to Archornithes by Jaekel (1911); to Coelurosauria by Gauthier and Padian (1985); to Aves by Bakker (1986); to Archaeopteryginae by Paul (1988); to Coelurosauria by Gauthier et al. (1989); to Archaeopterygiformes by Chatterjee (1991); to Maniraptora by Holtz (1994); to Archosauria by Senter (2004); to Aves by Owen (1862), Owen (1864), Charig (1985), Sereno (1997), Sereno (1998), Ji et al. (1999), Sereno (1999), Holtz (2000), Chiappe (2002), Rauhut (2003), Chatterjee and Templin (2007); to Archaeopterygidae by Hay (1902), Petronievics (1927), Hay (1930), Lambrecht (1933), Wetmore (1960), Brodkorb (1978), Osmolska (1981), Carroll (1988), Ji and Ji (1997), Padian (2004), Mayr et al. (2007); to Paraves by O'Connor and Sullivan (2014); to Aves by Gardiner (1982), Senter et al. (2004), O'Connor and Zelenkov (2013), Wang et al. (2014), Zhang et al. (2014), Wang et al. (2014), Wang et al. (2014), O'Connor et al. (2014), Wang et al. (2015), Wang and Liu (2015); and to Avialae by Gauthier (1986), Perle et al. (1993), Norell and Clarke (2001), Maryanska et al. (2002), Ji and Ji (2007), Lee and Worthy (2011), Gianechini et al. (2011), Godefroit et al. (2013), Kundrát et al. (2019).