Webpage Text Extractor - Clean Page Text and Word Counts

Extract readable text from public web pages in a simple structured format. The actor fetches each URL, removes noisy script, style, noscript, and SVG content, captures the page title, normalizes whitespace, calculates text length and word count, and returns one clean dataset item per page. Export to JSON/CSV/Excel, run on a schedule, call via API, or connect to Make, Zapier or n8n.

What is the Webpage Text Extractor?

The Webpage Text Extractor is a lightweight website utility for content audits, research workflows, AI preprocessing, SEO checks, and monitoring. Many teams need the actual text from a page without navigation markup, JavaScript code, CSS, tracking snippets, and layout noise. This actor gives you a fast, low-cost way to collect that text from lists of URLs.

It is intentionally direct and reliable: no login, no browser, no proxy by default, and no heavy rendering. It works best on public pages where the main content is present in the server response. That includes landing pages, documentation pages, blog posts, knowledge-base articles, legal pages, public product pages, and simple marketing sites.

The output is designed for automation rather than visual browsing. It keeps the source URL, final URL, title, response content type, word count, and cleaned page text together in one row, so you can send it directly into a spreadsheet, database, classifier, enrichment workflow, or AI summarization pipeline.

What data does it extract?

• Input URL and normalized request URL
• Final URL after redirects
• Domain
• HTTP status code
• Page title
• Clean text preview/body
• Text length in characters
• Word count
• Content-Type response header

Input

Field	Type	Description
urls	array	Web pages to fetch and convert into clean text rows.

Example input

{
  "urls": [
    "https://example.com",
    "https://docs.apify.com/platform/actors"
  ]
}

Output

{
  "input": "https://example.com",
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "final_url": "https://example.com/",
  "domain": "example.com",
  "status_code": 200,
  "title": "Example Domain",
  "text": "Example Domain This domain is for use in illustrative examples in documents...",
  "text_length": 178,
  "word_count": 21,
  "content_type": "text/html"
}

Use cases

• SEO audits: collect titles, word counts, and page copy from large URL lists.
• AI data preparation: turn public pages into text that can be embedded, summarized, classified, or routed into a RAG pipeline.
• Compliance monitoring: check whether policy, pricing, or legal pages changed over time.
• Lead research: enrich company URL lists with page text before classification or outreach segmentation.

Practical tips

Use this actor when you already know the URLs you want to process. If you need to discover URLs first, combine it with a sitemap actor, crawler, Google search actor, or your own list from a CRM. For AI use cases, keep the URL and title fields with the text so every downstream chunk can be traced back to its source page.

For content audits, sort by word_count to find thin pages, unexpectedly long pages, or pages that returned a template instead of the intended content. For monitoring, store each run's dataset and compare the text_length, word_count, and text fields over time.

If you are feeding results into another system, keep batches small at first and inspect a few rows manually. Website templates vary a lot, and a quick first pass helps you decide whether the direct HTML response contains enough useful content or whether a site-specific scraper would be better.

Reliability and performance

The actor uses direct HTTP instead of browser rendering. That means it starts quickly, costs less to run, and is suitable for recurring checks. It follows redirects and processes URLs concurrently. If one URL fails, the actor logs the failure and continues with the rest of the input list.

FAQ

Does it extract only article text? It extracts readable page text after removing common technical noise. It does not perform full article-readability scoring.

Does it use a browser? No. Direct HTTP keeps the actor fast and stable for scheduled runs.

Will it work on JavaScript-only websites? Only if meaningful text appears in the HTML response. Pages that render all content client-side may need a browser actor.

Can I process many URLs? Yes. Paste a list of URLs or call the actor through the API.

Is the full text returned? The actor returns up to a large text limit per page to keep dataset rows practical.

Can I export the output? Yes. Apify datasets export to JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, and RSS.

Is it legal? The actor reads public pages. You must follow website terms, robots directives, and applicable privacy or copyright rules.

How does pricing work? Pay-per-event billing charges per page result pushed to the dataset.

Can I schedule checks? Yes. Use Apify schedules to run the same URL list daily, weekly, or monthly.

Does it store screenshots? No. It returns text and metadata only.

Can it extract text from PDFs? No. This actor is for HTML pages. Use a PDF-specific actor for PDF documents.

Can I use it for RAG ingestion? Yes. It is a simple first step for collecting page text before chunking, embedding, or summarizing it downstream.

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Keywords: webpage text extractor, website text scraper, page text to csv, extract website copy, SEO word count, clean HTML text, content audit tool, website monitoring, URL text extractor, page title extractor, Apify scraper, AI data preparation, RAG preprocessing, no code scraper, public web data