# Website Content Crawler: Markdown for AI (Half Price) (`laudable_instrument/website-content-crawler-half-price`) Actor

Crawl any website and get each page's main content as clean Markdown and text for LLMs, RAG and search. Sitemap-seeded, de-duplicated, no nav or cookie banners. Respects robots.txt and AI-crawler opt-outs. $1.50 per 1,000 pages.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/laudable_instrument/website-content-crawler-half-price.md
- **Developed by:** [Unadhi](https://apify.com/laudable_instrument) (community)
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

Pay per usage

This Actor is paid per platform usage. The Actor is free to use, and you only pay for the Apify platform usage, which gets cheaper the higher subscription plan you have.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-usage

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

## Website Content Crawler: Clean Markdown for AI and RAG at Half Price

Give it one or more website URLs. The Actor crawls each site (sitemap first, then links, same site only) and returns **one row per page**: clean main-content Markdown (or plain text), title, description, language, headings, canonical URL, word count and a content hash.

**Price: $1.50 per 1,000 pages** (pay per event `page`). That is 50% of `6sigmag/fast-website-content-crawler` ($3 per 1,000). Pages that are skipped, duplicated, too short or opted out are free.

### Why it's better

| | This Actor |
|---|---|
| Price | $0.0015 per page, flat on every plan. No per-GB start fee |
| Clean content | Removes nav, footers, cookie banners and boilerplate, keeping the headings, lists, tables and code blocks. On 60 pages compared with trafilatura 2.2.0: precision 0.89, recall 0.96 |
| No duplicates | Canonical URLs plus content-hash dedupe, so you never pay twice for the same page |
| Respects AI opt-outs | Honours robots.txt (RFC 9309), including AI-bot groups such as GPTBot, `noai` meta tags and TDM-Rep (`honorAiOptOut`, on by default). Blocklisted platforms (LinkedIn, etc.) are never fetched |
| Control | `maxPagesPerSite`, `maxDepth`, `stayUnderStartPath`, include and exclude URL patterns, `minWords` |
| Spend limit | Stops cleanly at your max-charge limit |

### Input

```json
{ "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.python-httpx.org/" }], "maxPagesPerSite": 50, "maxDepth": 3,
  "useSitemap": true, "stayUnderStartPath": true, "outputMarkdown": true, "minWords": 20 }
```

### Output fields

`url, site, depth, title, description, language, canonicalUrl, headings, wordCount, markdown, text, contentHash, httpStatus, fetchedAt`. See `test/sample_output.json` for real rows.

### Measured on 18 real sites (29 Sep 2026)

- **280 pages** at 20 pages per site in 38.5 s wall time, 27.4 CPU-s and 230 MB peak memory.
- Correctly refused:
  - nytimes.com and medium.com (their robots.txt disallows AI crawlers)
  - linkedin.com (blocklist)

### Use it responsibly

Crawl only content you have the right to use. The Actor never logs in and never gets around blocks.

### Pricing

| Event | Price |
|---|---|
| `page` (primary) | $0.0015 per page = **$1.50 per 1,000 pages** (all tiers) |
| `apify-actor-start` | Apify default |

# Actor input Schema

## `startUrls` (type: `array`):

One crawl per start URL. Only pages on the same site (and, by default, under the same path) are crawled.

## `maxPagesPerSite` (type: `integer`):

Stop crawling a start URL after this many pages.

## `maxPagesTotal` (type: `integer`):

Stop the whole run after this many pages. 0 means no overall limit.

## `maxDepth` (type: `integer`):

How many link hops away from the start URL to follow. 0 = start page (and sitemap URLs) only.

## `useSitemap` (type: `boolean`):

Adds URLs from the site's sitemap (found via robots.txt) to the queue.

## `stayUnderStartPath` (type: `boolean`):

e.g. start at /docs/ and only crawl /docs/...

## `includeUrlPatterns` (type: `array`):

If set, only crawl URLs matching at least one of these regular expressions.

## `excludeUrlPatterns` (type: `array`):

Never crawl URLs matching any of these regular expressions.

## `outputMarkdown` (type: `boolean`):

Include the page's main content as Markdown.

## `keepLinksInMarkdown` (type: `boolean`):

Keep hyperlinks in the Markdown output (turn off for plain prose).

## `outputText` (type: `boolean`):

Also include a plain-text version of the main content.

## `minWords` (type: `integer`):

Near-empty pages are skipped and not charged.

## `honorAiOptOut` (type: `boolean`):

Obey robots.txt groups for AI crawlers (GPTBot, CCBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended...), meta/X-Robots-Tag 'noai' and W3C TDM-Rep reservations. Recommended because output is typically used for AI.

## `maxConcurrency` (type: `integer`):

Number of websites crawled at the same time.

## `politeDelaySecs` (type: `string`):

Crawl-delay from robots.txt is used if longer.

## `requestTimeoutSecs` (type: `integer`):

Give up on a page request after this many seconds.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "startUrls": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.python-httpx.org/"
    }
  ],
  "maxPagesPerSite": 50,
  "maxPagesTotal": 0,
  "maxDepth": 3,
  "useSitemap": true,
  "stayUnderStartPath": true,
  "includeUrlPatterns": [],
  "excludeUrlPatterns": [],
  "outputMarkdown": true,
  "keepLinksInMarkdown": true,
  "outputText": false,
  "minWords": 20,
  "honorAiOptOut": true,
  "maxConcurrency": 8,
  "politeDelaySecs": "0.25",
  "requestTimeoutSecs": 20
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `results` (type: `string`):

No description

## `summary` (type: `string`):

No description

## `runStats` (type: `string`):

No description

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "startUrls": [
        {
            "url": "https://www.python-httpx.org/"
        }
    ]
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("laudable_instrument/website-content-crawler-half-price").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = { "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.python-httpx.org/" }] }

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("laudable_instrument/website-content-crawler-half-price").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "startUrls": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.python-httpx.org/"
    }
  ]
}' |
apify call laudable_instrument/website-content-crawler-half-price --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,laudable_instrument/website-content-crawler-half-price"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/u59q0BkhBPCYlHU8i/builds/4QRwPE21aAJUmf2xo/openapi.json