Article Extractor: Full Text, Author & Date from Any News URL

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Article Extractor at a glance

• Input: A list of URLs.
• Output: one row per article with 12 fields, including title, author, publishedTime, wordCount.
• Price: $3 per 1,000 articles, charged only for results.
• You need: nothing else. No cookies, no logins, no proxies and no API keys.
• Export: JSON, CSV, Excel or XML, or straight into your own tools with the Apify API and MCP.

What is Article Extractor?

Extracts clean, readable articles from any news site or blog. Each result has the full text as markdown, the title, author and publish date when the page states them, the site name, language, description, lead image and word count. Menus, related links, ads and comment sections are removed. Pages that are not articles are skipped and not charged, and a missing author or date comes back as null rather than a guess. Built for news monitoring, media tracking, AI summarisation and research datasets.

• Full article text. The body of the article as clean markdown, without menus, related links, ads or comment sections.
• Author and date. Every author and the publish time, left empty when the page does not state them, so your data stays clean.
• Publication details. Site name, language, description and lead image.
• Word count. For filtering short pieces or budgeting tokens.

What data can I extract with Article Extractor?

Every result is one row per article, with these fields:

Field	What it holds
url	The URL you asked for
finalUrl	Where the URL ended up after redirects
title	Article headline
author	Every author, joined into one line
authors	Every author as a list, in byline order
publishedTime	Publish date, when the page states it
siteName	Publication name
language	Detected language
description	Summary line from the page
image	Lead image URL
wordCount	Words in the article
text	The full article as clean markdown

The table view in Apify shows URL, Title, Authors, Published, Words. The full record is in the JSON, CSV, Excel and XML exports, and over the API.

How to use Article Extractor

1. Open Article Extractor in the Apify Console. A free Apify account is enough to try it.
2. Paste your URLs, one per line, or upload a list.
3. Click Start. Each URL is processed on its own, so one bad entry never loses the batch.
4. Download the results as JSON, CSV or Excel, or send them to your own tools with an integration.

Input

One field: URLs. Use full URLs, including https://.

Every line is checked before the run starts. Each must be a web address like https://stripe.com/pricing; a run with any other line is refused with that line named, so a typo never costs you anything.

{
  "urls": [
    "https://stripe.com/blog/idempotency",
    "https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/how-we-improved-push-processing-on-github/"
  ]
}

Output

A article we cannot resolve is skipped rather than returned empty, and you are not charged for it. The run log names every one that was skipped, so a short result is never a mystery.

{
  "url": "https://stripe.com/blog/idempotency",
  "title": "Designing robust and predictable APIs with idempotency",
  "author": "Brandur Leach",
  "authors": [
    "Brandur Leach"
  ],
  "publishedTime": "2017-02-22",
  "siteName": "Stripe",
  "language": "en",
  "wordCount": 1415,
  "text": "**Authors:** Brandur Leach\n\n**Published:** 2017-02-22\n\n# Designing robust and predictable APIs with idempotency\n\nNetworks are unreliable. ..."
}

How much does Article Extractor cost?

Article Extractor costs $3 per 1,000 articles returned, which is $0.003 each, with no separate compute charge. 10,000 articles cost $30.

• You pay only for results. A article that cannot be resolved is skipped and free.
• Try it on the free plan. Each free Apify account can run up to 50 articles through this Actor. On a paid plan, $5 covers about 1,666 articles.
• Volume discounts. Scale plans pay 5% less per result and Business plans 10% less.
• Cap any run. Set a maximum cost per run in the run options and the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached.

Common use cases

• News monitoring. Turn a list of article links into readable text with dates you can sort by.
• Media and PR tracking. Collect coverage of a brand or topic with author and publication.
• AI summarisation. Feed clean article text to a model instead of cluttered HTML.
• Research datasets. Build a corpus of articles from many publishers in one run.

Integrate Article Extractor with other apps

Article Extractor works with the integrations on the Apify platform, including Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets, Slack, Airbyte, LangChain, LlamaIndex. Results can also go anywhere with a webhook when a run finishes.

To keep a list current, save your input as a task and put it on a schedule.

Article Extractor API

Run Article Extractor from your own code with the Apify API clients.

JavaScript

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('hydrafetch/article-extractor').call({ urls: ["https://stripe.com/blog/idempotency","https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/how-we-improved-push-processing-on-github/"] });
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("hydrafetch/article-extractor").call(run_input={"urls": ["https://stripe.com/blog/idempotency","https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/how-we-improved-push-processing-on-github/"]})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

AI agents can call it too. Connect Claude, Cursor or any MCP client to the Apify MCP server and add hydrafetch/article-extractor as a tool.

FAQ

What if a URL is not an article?

Pages without a real article body, such as homepages or short listings, are skipped and not charged.

Why is the author or date sometimes null?

Because the page does not state it. Fields stay empty rather than filled with a guess.

What if an article has several authors?

All of them come back, in the order the byline lists them: as a list in authors, and joined into one line in author. That covers posts that credit authors only through their author links, not just ones that declare them in metadata.

Which sites does it work on?

Any news site or blog. There is no per-site setup, so a new publisher works the day you add it.

Do I need cookies, a login or proxies?

No. Article Extractor works without cookies, accounts, proxies or API keys. Paste your URLs and run it; everything else is handled for you.

Is it legal to use Article Extractor?

Article Extractor collects only publicly available article text and metadata. As with any data collection, you are responsible for how you use the results: follow the terms of the websites you work with and data protection laws such as GDPR wherever personal data is involved. If you are unsure about your use case, check with a lawyer.

Does Article Extractor have an API?

Yes. Every run is available through the Apify API, with the JavaScript and Python examples above, and through the Apify MCP server for AI agents.

Other Actors by Hydrafetch

• Company Enrichment API: turn a list of domains into full company records: name, description, logo, brand colors, fonts, socials and industry.
• Bulk Company Logo Finder: give it a list of domains and get a direct image URL for each company logo, with dimensions and dominant color.
• Website Color Palette Extractor: read a site's real design system: colors by role with contrast ratios, the type scale, corner radius and button styling.
• AI SEO & GEO Audit: check whether an LLM or AI agent can actually read your pages, and get the specific reasons when it cannot.
• Website to Markdown: turn a list of URLs into clean markdown for LLMs, RAG and AI agents, with navigation, banners and boilerplate removed.
• Company Social Links Finder: find the LinkedIn company page and every social profile a company links from its own website, from just the domain.
• LinkedIn Company Scraper: get industry, company size, headcount, followers, headquarters and more from LinkedIn company pages, by URL or by domain.
• Tech Stack Detector: find the CMS, ecommerce platform, analytics, frameworks, hosting and payment tools any website runs, from just the domain.
• PDF to Markdown: convert PDF links into clean markdown with headings and tables intact, ready for LLMs, RAG and search.
• Website Crawler to Markdown: crawl a whole website or docs section into clean markdown for LLMs, RAG and AI agents, one row per page.
• Company Jobs Scraper: get every open job at a company from just its domain: titles, teams, locations, pay and full descriptions, from the hiring platform it uses.
• YouTube Transcript Scraper: get the full transcript of any YouTube video with timestamps, title and channel, ready for AI summaries, RAG and search.
• Google Ads Library Scraper: get every Google ad a company runs from just its domain: creatives, formats and first and last shown dates, from the public Ads Transparency Center.
• Company Website Finder: turn a list of company names into their official websites and domains, each checked against the company homepage so directories never slip through.
• Website Screenshot API: capture screenshots of any web pages as hosted PNG links, full page or first screen, rendered in a real browser and priced per screenshot.

Terms of use

Your results are yours. We claim no rights in the inputs you submit or the data you get back. Full terms: hydrafetch.com/terms

Your feedback

Something not working, or a field you need? Open an issue on the Issues tab with the input you used, and we read every one.

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