Article Extractor: News & Blog Article Text Scraper

Extract clean, structured data from news articles and blog posts. Each article gives you:

• headline and description
• site name, language and canonical URL
• publish and update dates
• lead image
• tags as declared in the page metadata
• the full body text, with menus, ads, related links and comments removed
• a word count and an estimated reading time

At a glance: $0.50 per 1,000 articles, plus $0.00005 per run start. Pay per result with no subscription. You can set a maximum cost per run, export to JSON, CSV or Excel, or call it from the Apify API, Make, Zapier or n8n.

There are two ways to use it:

• Article URLs. Give it the article links you already have.
• Section pages. Give it a section page, such as a news site's technology section or a blog index. It finds the article links on that page and extracts each one.

It runs on fast plain HTTP with no browser, and robots.txt is respected (RFC 9309) on every request.

Use cases

• Media monitoring: pull the latest articles from the sections you follow every hour (schedule the Actor).
• LLM work: feed full article text to an LLM for summaries, sentiment or topic tagging. Turn on includeMarkdown to keep headings and links.
• Research datasets: build a dataset of articles with dates and sources.
• Link enrichment: add titles, dates and text to a list of links shared in Slack, a newsletter or a spreadsheet.

Input

{
  "articleUrls": [{"url": "https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/from-cheap-tool-to-premium-subscription-when-a-beloved-apps-price-skyrockets/"}],
  "sectionUrls": [{"url": "https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/"}],
  "maxArticlesPerSection": 20,
  "minWords": 100,
  "includeMarkdown": false,
  "maxConcurrency": 8,
  "maxArticles": 0
}

Field	Default	What it does
articleUrls	one example page	Direct links to articles or blog posts.
sectionUrls	none	Pages that list articles. Article links anywhere on the same site are detected from the URL pattern (dates, long slugs, numeric IDs), so a section page can also yield articles from other sections of that site.
maxArticlesPerSection	20	How many discovered links to extract from each section page.
minWords	100	Pages with less body text are skipped for free. This catches index pages, video pages and paywall stubs.
includeMarkdown	false	Also return the body as Markdown, with headings, lists and links.
maxConcurrency	8 (max 20)	Articles fetched in parallel. Requests to one host are spaced at least 0.5 s apart.
maxArticles	0	Stop after this many articles. 0 means no cap.

Output example

Real output from a test run (body text shortened):

{
  "url": "https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/from-cheap-tool-to-premium-subscription-when-a-beloved-apps-price-skyrockets/",
  "finalUrl": "https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/from-cheap-tool-to-premium-subscription-when-a-beloved-apps-price-skyrockets/",
  "title": "From cheap tool to premium subscription: When a beloved app's price skyrockets",
  "description": "Huge price hikes force loyal users to reconsider their favorite apps.",
  "siteName": "Ars Technica",
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-27T15:50:19+00:00",
  "modifiedAt": "2026-10-27T17:57:01+00:00",
  "language": "en",
  "leadImageUrl": "https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/GettyImages-1321941710-1152x648.jpg",
  "tags": [],
  "canonicalUrl": "https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/from-cheap-tool-to-premium-subscription-when-a-beloved-apps-price-skyrockets/",
  "text": "How much are you willing to pay to keep using your favorite app?\nMaybe you’ve used it for years. Perhaps it performs a function so essential and specific that y ...",
  "wordCount": 319,
  "readingTimeMinutes": 2,
  "extractedAt": "2026-10-28T03:58:00+00:00"
}

tags is empty when a site does not declare tags in its metadata. Author bylines are not collected, so the output stays free of personal data.

Pricing

Pay per extracted article: $0.50 per 1,000 articles ($0.0005 per article), plus the standard Apify run start event of $0.00005 per run.

These are free:

• section pages
• failed URLs
• pages under Minimum words

If a run extracts no articles at all, it writes one free status row (recordType: "status") that says why, so the dataset is not left empty. The exception is when your maximum cost per run stops the run before its first article.

Set Maximum cost per run or maxArticles, and the Actor stops cleanly when that limit is reached.

Use with AI agents / MCP

AI agents can run this Actor as a tool through Apify's MCP server. Add this server URL to your MCP client (Claude, Cursor, VS Code, OpenAI Agents SDK, LangChain and others) and sign in with OAuth, or send your Apify token as Authorization: Bearer <token>:

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=fecklesspleb/article-extractor

The tool is named fecklesspleb--article-extractor. Agents can also find it with search-actors and run it with call-actor. The run returns a dataset ID; read the rows with get-dataset-items, and pass fields (for example url,title,publishedAt,text) to keep the response small.

Minimal tool input:

{"articleUrls": [{"url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping"}]}

The output of this input (a real item from a run, text shortened):

{
  "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
  "finalUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
  "title": "Web scraping - Wikipedia",
  "description": null,
  "siteName": "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.",
  "publishedAt": "2005-09-17",
  "modifiedAt": null,
  "language": "en",
  "leadImageUrl": null,
  "tags": [],
  "canonicalUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
  "text": "Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. ...",
  "wordCount": 4142,
  "readingTimeMinutes": 19,
  "extractedAt": "2026-11-03T15:31:18.854793+00:00"
}

Tips for agents:

• Cost is $0.0005 per extracted article. Set maxArticles, and set maxTotalChargeUsd in the run options (callOptions in call-actor) to cap a run.
• With sectionUrls, also pass "articleUrls": [] so the default example article is not extracted as well. maxArticlesPerSection (default 20) limits each section page.
• URLs that fail or have fewer than minWords words get no row and are free, so compare the rows you get with the URLs you sent. If no article is extracted, the dataset holds one free row with recordType: "status" and a message saying why.
• The RUN_SUMMARY record in the run's key-value store shows candidateUrls, articles, failed and tooShort.

Limits

• There is no JavaScript rendering and no login, so paywalled text and browser-rendered pages are not extracted.
• Some sites block automated clients or disallow them in robots.txt. Those URLs are skipped and logged.
• On the Apify platform, URLs whose address is private, loopback or link-local (also after a redirect) are not fetched. They are skipped, logged and not charged.
• Articles split over several pages return only the first page.
• Section discovery works from URL patterns. Busy home pages can include links to other sections or to podcast and index pages; minWords filters out most of them.

What happens with invalid input? If the input is not a JSON object, or a field has the wrong type (for example a number where a list of URLs is expected, or "abc" for a number), the run fetches nothing and ends with one free status row: Invalid input, nothing was fetched and no results were charged: <reason>. No results are charged for it; the standard Apify start event still applies.

Is this legal?

The Actor reads only public pages you point it at, identifies itself, spaces requests and obeys robots.txt. Article text is usually copyrighted. Use it for analysis, search and research in line with each publisher's terms, and do not republish it without permission.