# Website Content Scraper: Clean Markdown for AI and RAG (`scrapemint/website-content-scraper`) Actor

Crawl any website and get clean markdown, text, or HTML per page, ready for RAG pipelines, chatbots, and LLM fine tuning. Plain HTTP, no browser, no API key. Pay per page.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/scrapemint/website-content-scraper.md
- **Developed by:** [Ken M](https://apify.com/scrapemint) (community)
- **Categories:** AI, Developer tools
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 2 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

$3.00 / 1,000 website page rows

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/platform/actors/running/actors-in-store#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

Actors are web data automations that power AI and operations. They run on the Apify platform to scrape websites, process data, connect APIs, and automate workflows.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.
Actors are written with capital "A".

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.
The best way to integrate Actors is as follows.

- **AI agents and MCP clients** — the [Apify MCP server](https://docs.apify.com/integrations/mcp.md) at `https://mcp.apify.com` (remote, streamable HTTP, OAuth on first use).
- **Agentic workflows and local Actor development** — [Agent Skills](https://apify.com/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json) with the [Apify CLI](https://docs.apify.com/cli/docs.md): `npm install -g apify-cli`, then `apify login`.
- **JavaScript/TypeScript projects** — the official [JS/TS client](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md): `npm install apify-client`.
- **Python projects** — the official [Python client](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md): `pip install apify-client`.
- **Any other language** — the [REST API](https://docs.apify.com/api/v2.md).

For usage examples, see the [API](#api) section below.

For more details, see Apify documentation as [Markdown index](https://docs.apify.com/llms.txt) and [Markdown full-text](https://docs.apify.com/llms-full.txt).

# README

## Website Content Scraper: Clean Markdown for AI and RAG

Turn any website into LLM-ready data. Give this Actor one or more start URLs and it crawls the site breadth-first over plain HTTP, strips navigation, footers, scripts, and other boilerplate from every page, and returns one clean row per page as markdown, plain text, or trimmed HTML. No browser, no API key, no proxy needed for most sites.

Built for developers feeding RAG pipelines, chatbots, vector databases, and fine-tuning datasets, and for anyone who needs a site's content as structured rows instead of raw HTML. Point it at a docs site, a blog, a knowledge base, or a competitor's marketing pages and get back content you can embed or index directly.

### What you get

One row per crawled page, with:

- `content` (main page content as markdown by default; switch to plain text or cleaned HTML)
- `title`, `description` (meta), `lang`, `canonical`
- `url`, `finalUrl` (after redirects), `depth`, `wordCount`, `crawledAt`

Boilerplate is removed before extraction: scripts, styles, nav bars, headers, footers, sidebars, forms, and cookie banners. The main content region (`main`, `article`, or `role="main"`) is preferred when the page declares one.

### Input

- `startUrls` (pages to start from)
- `maxPages` (hard cap per run, default 20, up to 500)
- `maxDepth` (0 = start URLs only, default 2)
- `sameDomainOnly` (default true, subdomains included)
- `includePatterns` / `excludePatterns` (URL substring filters, e.g. only `/docs/`)
- `outputFormat` (`markdown`, `text`, or `html`)
- `useSitemap` (also seed the crawl from sitemap.xml)

### Example input

```json
{
  "startUrls": ["https://docs.apify.com/platform"],
  "maxPages": 20,
  "maxDepth": 2,
  "includePatterns": ["/platform"],
  "outputFormat": "markdown"
}
```

### Example output

```json
{
  "url": "https://docs.apify.com/platform/actors",
  "finalUrl": "https://docs.apify.com/platform/actors",
  "depth": 1,
  "title": "Actors | Platform | Apify Documentation",
  "description": "Learn how to develop, run and share serverless cloud programs.",
  "lang": "en",
  "format": "markdown",
  "content": "# Actors\n\nActors are serverless cloud programs that can do almost anything a human can do in a web browser...",
  "wordCount": 412,
  "crawledAt": "2026-07-05T20:00:00.000Z"
}
```

### Uses

- Feed a RAG pipeline or vector database with a docs site, help center, or blog
- Build fine-tuning or evaluation datasets from real site content
- Keep a chatbot's knowledge base in sync with your product docs on a schedule
- Monitor competitor marketing and docs pages as clean diffs instead of HTML soup
- Archive a site's content as structured, searchable rows

### Pricing

Pay per page. Only pages that return real content are pushed and charged; failed fetches, redirects to non-HTML, and empty pages cost nothing. The first 2 pages of every run are free so you can validate output before you scale up.

### Notes

- Plain HTTP fetching keeps runs fast and cheap. JavaScript-only sites (content rendered entirely client-side) are out of scope; most docs sites, blogs, and marketing sites work fine.
- The crawler identifies itself with a descriptive User-Agent and fetches politely with capped concurrency.

# Actor input Schema

## `startUrls` (type: `array`):

Pages to start crawling from. The crawler follows same-site links from here (breadth-first) up to Max pages / Max depth.

## `maxPages` (type: `integer`):

Hard cap on pages fetched and returned. Controls total cost.

## `maxDepth` (type: `integer`):

0 scrapes only the start URLs, 1 adds pages they link to, and so on.

## `sameDomainOnly` (type: `boolean`):

Only follow links on the same domain as the start URL (subdomains included).

## `includePatterns` (type: `array`):

If set, only URLs containing at least one of these substrings are crawled (start URLs are always fetched). Example: /docs/

## `excludePatterns` (type: `array`):

URLs containing any of these substrings are skipped. Example: /changelog/

## `outputFormat` (type: `string`):

Format of the extracted page content.

## `useSitemap` (type: `boolean`):

Also seed the crawl with URLs from the site's sitemap.xml (subject to the same filters and caps).

## `proxyConfiguration` (type: `object`):

Optional. Most sites work without any proxy. Enable datacenter proxy only if your target blocks direct requests.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "startUrls": [
    "https://docs.apify.com/platform"
  ],
  "maxPages": 20,
  "maxDepth": 2,
  "sameDomainOnly": true,
  "includePatterns": [],
  "excludePatterns": [],
  "outputFormat": "markdown",
  "useSitemap": false,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}
```

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "startUrls": [
        "https://docs.apify.com/platform"
    ]
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("scrapemint/website-content-scraper").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = { "startUrls": ["https://docs.apify.com/platform"] }

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("scrapemint/website-content-scraper").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print("💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/" + run["defaultDatasetId"])
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "startUrls": [
    "https://docs.apify.com/platform"
  ]
}' |
apify call scrapemint/website-content-scraper --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "command": "npx",
            "args": [
                "mcp-remote",
                "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=scrapemint/website-content-scraper",
                "--header",
                "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_API_TOKEN>"
            ]
        }
    }
}

```

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/FGVINNb94tDLsGKao/builds/76ZjKWfTa3pk7fIDp/openapi.json