Universal Web Snapshot

Snapshot any URL via a connector chain: static HTML first, Playwright browser if static returns thin content, Wayback Machine if both fail.

Pure scraper. No API keys. No LLM dependency. Designed to be robust against the three most common scraping failure modes:

Failure mode	Tier that handles it
Site returns HTML but it's a JS-only SPA (Notion, Linear, Figma)	Playwright browser
Site blocks datacenter IPs	Apify proxy routing
Site is down right now but has Wayback snapshots	Wayback Machine

What you get back per URL

Field	Description
input_url, final_url, status	Identity + HTTP response
tier_used	"static" / "browser" / "wayback" - tells you which connector won
archived_at	If Wayback was used, the snapshot timestamp
signals.title, og_title, meta_description, og_description, canonical_url	Standard meta fields
signals.h1[], h2[]	First N headings (typically your hero copy)
signals.json_ld[]	Any JSON-LD structured data the page exposes
text_excerpt (first 2000 chars), text_full (up to 20k), text_length	Cleaned text content
screenshot_url	Optional PNG (Playwright tier only) saved to actor KV store
tries[]	Per-tier result so you can see what was attempted
elapsed_ms	Total processing time

Pricing

$0.05 per successful snapshot. Failed URLs (all three tiers exhausted) are not charged.

Use case	URLs	Cost
Quick competitor sweep	20	$1.00
Daily monitoring (100 URLs/day)	3,000/mo	$150/mo
One-off content audit	500	$25.00

How the connector chain works

1. Static fetch (cheap, fast)        ─┐
   ├─ HTTP 200 + > 300 chars         │ Done. tier_used="static".
   └─ Thin/blocked/missing content   ─┤
                                      │
2. Playwright browser (heavier)      ─┤
   ├─ Renders JS, waits for network  │ Done. tier_used="browser".
   └─ Browser failure / still thin   ─┤
                                      │
3. Wayback Machine (last resort)     ─┤
   ├─ Finds archived snapshot        │ Done. tier_used="wayback".
   └─ No archive available           ─┘ Error returned.

The buyer is only charged for successful snapshots, regardless of how many tiers were tried.

Use cases

• Pricing intel: monitor competitor pricing pages even when they are JS-rendered.
• Content audits: snapshot 500 URLs across a domain, get clean text for analysis.
• AI training data: prepare structured input for LLM pipelines from any web source.
• Compliance / legal: archive a copy of pages with a Wayback timestamp for evidence.
• SEO research: extract title + meta + h1/h2 across competitor sites.
• Investor due diligence: snapshot a company's site at a point in time.

Why this is a connector / plugin architecture

The actor's src/lib/scraping.js exposes:

• fetchStatic(url, opts) - tier 1 implementation
• fetchBrowser(url, opts) - tier 2 implementation
• fetchWayback(url, opts) - tier 3 implementation
• smartFetch(url, opts) - the orchestrator
• cleanHtml(html), extractSignals(html), normalizeUrl(input) - shared utilities

Any future scraper actor can import the same lib. This means a Pricing Watcher v2 (or any other actor that needs robust scraping) gets the same multi-tier fetch for free. The pattern lives once.

What this actor does NOT do

• It does not log into authenticated sites.
• It does not download non-HTML assets (PDFs, videos, etc).
• It does not paginate within a single URL (use a separate crawler for that).

Tags

scraping web-snapshot wayback playwright connector static-fetch headless-chrome content-extraction seo

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Made by Emily Ward, Cancel Costs.

Integrations

This actor works out of the box with every Apify-supported integration:

• API: call via Apify API or any official SDK (Python, JavaScript, PHP, .NET). Returns a clean dataset URL.
• Schedule: set a daily, weekly, or custom cron cadence in Apify Console. Combine with notification for fresh feeds.
• Webhooks: wire ACTOR.RUN.SUCCEEDED to Slack, Discord, Zapier, Make, n8n, Pipedream, or any HTTPS endpoint.
• MCP: this actor is discoverable through Apify's hosted MCP server at mcp.apify.com for Claude, Cursor, Cline, Windsurf, and other MCP clients.
• n8n / Make / Zapier: native HTTP-Request integration. Trigger the actor on schedule, pipe results to Google Sheets, Airtable, your CRM, or any database.

Try it free

Every Apify user gets $5/month in free platform credits (around 250 events at this actor's per-event price). Run preview mode first to confirm output shape before scaling.

New to Apify? Sign up here to get free credits on signup.

What's New

• 2026-06-03: Metadata, categories, and SEO refreshed. Latest version live on Apify Store.

Last Updated

2026-06-03