Smart Article Extractor

Smart Article Extractor

Extract clean article text, metadata, and author info from any URL, up to a million per run. Every article comes with its full body, title, date, and reading time. No HTML parsing needed. Export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML.

Web pages bury article content inside navigation, ads, and sidebars. This Actor reads a list of article URLs and returns only the meaningful content: the title, author, publication date, full text, and computed signals like reading time. It strips the noise so your dataset is clean from the start.

Who uses it	What they scrape Article Extractor for
Content marketers	Building a research database of competitor articles on a topic.
Data journalists	Gathering full-text articles from multiple news sources for analysis.
SEO analysts	Extracting on-page copy and metadata from ranking pages at scale.
Academic researchers	Collecting a corpus of web articles for text mining or NLP projects.

What it does

This Actor collects article content from a list of URLs and returns each one as a flat row with the full text and metadata.

• 📄 Full text extraction: the complete article body, cleaned of navigation, ads, and sidebars.
• 🏷️ Metadata capture: title, author name, publication date, and canonical URL per article.
• ⏱️ Computed signals: estimated reading time for each article.
• 🔗 Batch processing: paste a list of URLs and collect them all in one run.

Results export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML, or straight from the API.

What you can do with Article Extractor data

📚 Build a content research database.

A content marketer feeds a list of competitor blog URLs and gets back clean text and metadata to analyze topics, length, and author patterns.

📰 Monitor news coverage across outlets.

A data journalist collects articles from multiple news sites on the same story and compares framing, sources, and timing.

🔍 Audit on-page SEO at scale.

An SEO analyst extracts title tags, word counts, and reading times from hundreds of ranking pages to benchmark content quality.

🤖 Feed an NLP pipeline.

A researcher gathers a clean text corpus from web articles for sentiment analysis, topic modeling, or summarization experiments.

Why choose this scraper

	What you get
Clean text, no HTML	Get the article body as plain text or Markdown, ready for analysis or storage.
Author and date	Each row includes the author name and publication date when the page provides them.
Reading time	A computed estimate of how long the article takes to read, useful for content audits.
Any news site or blog	Works on BBC, Medium, CNN, and most article pages without site-specific configuration.

How it compares

No other Store actor targets Article Extractor the same way, so the honest comparison is with the alternatives teams actually weigh.

	Smart Article Extractor	Build it in-house	By hand
Setup	Run it now, zero config	Days of engineering	None, but hours per pull
When Article Extractor changes	Maintained for you	You fix it	You re-learn the page
Proxies, retries, anti-bot	Built in	Your problem	Browser only
Output	Fixed JSON schema, CSV/Excel export	Whatever you build	Copy-paste
Cost	Pay per result	Engineering time	Analyst hours

Configure the run

Drive the Actor from a list of article URLs and set a maximum number of articles to collect per run. The Input tab lists every parameter.

A first run with the defaults:

{
 "startUrls": [
 {
 "url": "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c86w8elez74o"
 }
 ],
 "maxItems": 10
}

A larger pull:

{
 "startUrls": [
 {
 "url": "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c86w8elez74o"
 }
 ],
 "maxItems": 200
}

Pricing

Pay-per-result: $0.042 per result collected. You pay only for the results written to your dataset.

Results collected	Approximate cost
100 results	$4.20
1,000 results	$42.00
10,000 results	$420.00

New Apify accounts start with $5 in free credit.

Free users

Free-plan runs return up to 10 results as a preview. Upgrade your Apify plan to collect up to 1,000,000 results per run.

Run it

1. Create a free Apify account with $5 in credit.
2. Open the Smart Article Extractor.
3. Set your inputs and any filters, then click Start.
4. Export the results as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML from the Dataset tab.

Run it programmatically through the Apify API (run-sync-get-dataset-items) or the ApifyClient for JavaScript and Python.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

Give an AI agent live access to Article Extractor through the Model Context Protocol. Add the Actor to Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client:

$claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=parseforge/article-extractor"

Then prompt it in plain language to run the scraper and read back the results.

Troubleshooting

Why is the extracted text incomplete or cut off?

Some pages load content dynamically with JavaScript. This Actor works best on static article pages. If the content is missing, the page may require a full browser render.

Why am I getting no results?

Check that your URLs are valid and accessible. Some sites block automated requests. Try a single known-good article URL first to verify the Actor is working.

Why is the author field empty?

Not all article pages mark up the author name in a way the extractor can find. The field is populated when the page includes standard author metadata.

Why is the publication date wrong or missing?

The Actor reads the date from the page metadata. If the site does not include a machine-readable date, the field will be empty. The date format varies by site.

Why does the run take so long?

Each URL requires a network request. Processing thousands of articles takes time. You can increase the speed by running with higher memory or using multiple instances if your plan allows.

FAQ

Question	Answer
What sites does this Actor work on?	It works on most article pages from news sites, blogs, and content platforms. It extracts the main content area and ignores navigation, ads, and sidebars. Some sites with heavy JavaScript rendering may need a full browser Actor instead.
Does it extract images or videos?	No, this Actor focuses on text content and metadata. It returns the article body as text, not embedded media files.
How many articles can I extract in one run?	You can set the maximum up to 1,000,000 articles per run. The actual number depends on your Apify plan limits and the response time of the target sites.
What format does the output come in?	You can export your dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML from the Apify console or via API.
Does it handle paywalled articles?	No, this Actor reads the publicly visible content of a page. It cannot bypass paywalls or login walls.
Can I extract articles in languages other than English?	Yes, the Actor extracts text regardless of language. The reading time estimate adapts to the character count of the extracted text.
How do I run it on a large list of URLs?	Paste your URLs into the startUrls field in the input, one per line. Set the maxItems to your desired limit and start the run.
Does it follow links from the article page?	No, this Actor processes only the exact URLs you provide. It does not crawl or follow links to other pages.
What is the difference between this and the Web Scraper?	This Actor automatically identifies and extracts the main article content without any configuration. The Web Scraper requires you to define page selectors and is better for structured data like product listings.

Related actors

Browse the full ParseForge collection for more scrapers.

🆘 Need help? Email parseforge@protonmail.com with your run ID, your input, and what you expected.

⚠️ Disclaimer. This Actor is unofficial and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Apify. It collects only publicly available data. You are responsible for using the collected data in compliance with the source's terms of service and applicable data-protection laws, including GDPR, CCPA, and PIPL. Do not use it to collect personal data unlawfully.