Article Extractor - News & Blog Text, Author, Date, Image

Extract news and blog articles from URLs or a site's home/section page: headline, authors, published and modified dates, lead image, language, site, section, tags, word count, paywall flag, clean text and Markdown. No browser, robots.txt respected. $0.40 per 1,000 articles.

Turn news and blog article URLs into clean, structured data. Give it article links, or just a site's home or section page (it finds the articles linked from it), and get one row per article with the headline, authors, published and modified dates (ISO 8601), lead image, description, language, site name, section, tags, word count, reading time, a paywall flag, and the full body as clean text and Markdown with ads, navigation, cookie banners and related-story boxes removed. Metadata comes from the page's own JSON-LD (NewsArticle, BlogPosting, Article), Open Graph and article meta tags, with the reader-view body from Mozilla Readability (the engine behind Firefox Reader View). Use it for news monitoring and media intelligence, content research, SEO and competitor content audits, building LLM / RAG datasets from articles, archiving, and feeding AI agents clean article text. It works with WordPress, Ghost, Substack, Medium-style blogs and most news sites that serve HTML. It runs with limited permissions and pay-per-event pricing, so it suits automations and AI agents: $0.40 per 1,000 articles; section pages, failed pages and non-articles are free.

What data does it return?

Every run outputs clean, schema-validated rows like these:

url	title	authors	publishedAt	siteName	wordCount	isPaywalled
https://blog.apify.com/introducing-x402-agentic-payments/	Let your AI agent pay for 20,000+ Apify Actors with x402	Štěpán Škopek	2026-06-30T12:52:48.000Z	Apify Blog	1752	false
https://blog.apify.com/announcing-mcp-connectors/	Announcing MCP connectors	Jan Čurn	2026-06-09T10:49:17.000Z	Apify Blog	1049	false

How much does it cost?

Transparent pay-per-event pricing — you only pay for what you get, and the actor always respects your run budget: set a maximum total charge and it stops cleanly at the cap instead of overrunning.

Event	Price	Charged	Worked example
article-extracted	$0.0004	per article extracted (section pages, failed pages and non-articles are free)	1,000 articles = $0.40
apify-actor-start	$0.00005	per run per GB of memory (platform start fee)	One run at 0.5 GB = $0.000025

Input options

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
startUrls	array	yes	—	Article URLs, and/or a site's home or section page (e.g. https://blog.example.com/ or https://news.example.com/world/): with 'Discover articles' on, the articles it links to on the same site are extracted.
discoverArticles	boolean	no	true	When a start URL is a home/section/listing page rather than an article, follow its same-site links that look like articles (one level deep). Off: only the given URLs are extracted.
maxArticles	integer	no	100	Stop after this many extracted (charged) articles.
minWords	integer	no	120	Pages with less reader-view text than this are not treated as articles (not charged). Lower it for short news briefs.
includeText	boolean	no	true	Add the article body as plain text (text).
includeMarkdown	boolean	no	true	Add the article body as Markdown with headings, lists, links and images (markdown), ready for LLMs and RAG.
includeHtml	boolean	no	false	Add the cleaned article HTML (html).
respectRobotsTxt	boolean	no	true	Skip pages the site's robots.txt disallows (free status row). Recommended.

Limits & honest notes

• No browser: pages are fetched as static HTML. Sites that build articles with JavaScript only get a free "needs-javascript" status row. Pages behind logins, CAPTCHAs or bot walls are not supported, and the actor does not try to get around them (no proxies, no browser fingerprints).
• Paywalled articles: only the text the site serves publicly is returned; isPaywalled is true when the page declares it (JSON-LD isAccessibleForFree: false) or shows paywall markup with a short body.
• Discovery follows one level of same-site links that look like articles (slugs with words, dated paths or numeric IDs); tag, category, author and utility pages are skipped. For full archives, give article URLs directly (for example from Sitemap Extractor or RSS Feed Reader).
• Authors are the public bylines the publisher puts on the article; no other personal data is collected.
• robots.txt is respected by default (RFC 9309), and requests identify themselves honestly as ActorForge-ArticleExtractor. Internal and private network addresses are refused at every redirect hop.
• Dates are converted to ISO 8601 UTC; date-only values stay YYYY-MM-DD. Duplicate articles (same canonical URL) are delivered once.
• Article text is copyrighted by its publishers: use the output for analysis, research, indexing and other lawful purposes, and respect each site's terms.

Related ActorForge actors

• News Search — find news article URLs by keyword worldwide
• RSS Feed Reader — new article URLs from any feed
• Website to Markdown — whole sites as Markdown for LLMs

Changelog

• 2026-10-23 — Initial release: article URLs or section pages → headline, authors, dates, lead image, language, site, section, tags, word count, paywall flag, text and Markdown.

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Built and maintained by ActorForge. Reliability first: every actor in the portfolio is monitored by an automated nightly self-test, and breakages are typically fixed the same day.