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

Paste links to news or blog articles and get one clean, structured record per article: headline, authors, publish and modified dates, the main text as plain text and Markdown, the lead image and every image in the article, language, tags, section, word count, reading time, canonical URL, site name and a short summary. You can also give it an RSS/Atom feed, an XML (news) sitemap or a site's homepage and it extracts the newest articles. $0.90 per 1,000 articles, and pages it cannot extract are not charged.

What can this article extractor do?

• Metadata the way publishers declare it. Fields come first from the page's JSON-LD (schema.org NewsArticle, BlogPosting and similar), then microdata and meta tags (Open Graph, article:*, Parse.ly, Dublin Core), then careful heuristics (<time> tags, dates in the URL, bylines). publishedAtSource and authorSource tell you where each value came from.
• Clean main text. Menus, ads, cookie banners, share buttons, comment prompts and "related stories" are removed. You get plain text and markdown with headings, lists, links, tables and images kept.
• All images. The lead image plus every image in the article body, with alt text, as absolute URLs.
• Normalised dates. ISO 8601 in UTC (2026-11-04T18:00:02Z), or a plain date when the page gives only a date.
• Language, tags, word count, reading time and an extractive summary made of the article's own key sentences (no AI, no extra cost).
• Discovery from feeds and sitemaps. RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, XML sitemaps, sitemap indexes and Google News sitemaps, newest first, with a per-source cap.
• Polite and compliant. robots.txt is always obeyed (including crawl-delay), and any Content-Signal the site declares (for example ai-train=no) is returned with each record.

How is this different from our Website to Markdown Crawler?

The Website to Markdown Crawler crawls whole websites and returns every page as Markdown for LLM and RAG pipelines. This tool works per article: you give it article links (or a feed), it does not follow links, and it focuses on article metadata: multiple authors, publish and modified dates with their source, publisher, section, tags, lead image and all images, reading time, summary and paywall flag. Use the crawler for documentation and whole sites; use this extractor for news, blogs and press releases.

Who uses it?

• Media monitoring and PR teams turning coverage links into a clean spreadsheet with author, outlet and date.
• Researchers and data journalists building article datasets with consistent fields across hundreds of publishers.
• AI and RAG developers feeding clean article text and Markdown with reliable dates and sources into their pipelines.
• Content and SEO teams auditing their own articles for missing authors, dates, images or tags.
• Newsletter and aggregator builders pulling the newest posts from feeds with full text and a summary.

How to use it

1. Click Try for free (or Start).
2. Paste article links into Article URLs, and/or add feeds, sitemaps or homepages under Discover articles from.
3. Choose what to include: plain text, Markdown, all images, summary length.
4. Run it and export to JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or read the results through the API.
5. To follow a publication, schedule a daily run on its feed.

Input example

{
  "articleUrls": [
    "https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-announces-ka-band-satellite-relay-awards-for-space-communications/",
    "https://theconversation.com/why-do-galaxies-rotate-291508"
  ],
  "discoveryUrls": [
    "https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/feed/"
  ],
  "maxArticlesPerSource": 10,
  "summarySentences": 3
}

Field	Description
articleUrls	Article links, one result each
discoveryUrls	RSS/Atom feeds, XML or news sitemaps, or homepages (their feed or sitemap is found automatically)
maxArticlesPerSource	Newest articles taken from each feed or sitemap (default 10)
sameSiteOnly	Ignore feed links pointing to other websites (default on)
maxArticles	Overall cap, 0 = none
includeText, includeMarkdown, includeImages	Choose the output fields
summarySentences	Sentences in the extractive summary, 0 = off (default 3)
maxTextChars	Trim long articles, 0 = full text
minWordCount	Pages with less text are skipped and not charged (default 50)

Output example

This is a real result from a default run (text and Markdown shortened here):

{
  "url": "https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-announces-ka-band-satellite-relay-awards-for-space-communications/",
  "finalUrl": "https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-announces-ka-band-satellite-relay-awards-for-space-communications/",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-announces-ka-band-satellite-relay-awards-for-space-communications/",
  "title": "NASA Announces Ka-Band Satellite Relay Awards for Space Communications",
  "authors": [
    "Jessica Taveau"
  ],
  "author": "Jessica Taveau",
  "publishedAt": "2026-11-04T18:00:02Z",
  "modifiedAt": "2026-11-04T18:00:04Z",
  "publishedAtSource": "meta",
  "siteName": "NASA",
  "publisher": "NASA",
  "section": "Space Communications & Navigation Program",
  "tags": [
    "Technology",
    "Communicating and Navigating with Missions",
    "Space Communications Technology",
    "Space Communications & Navigation Program"
  ],
  "language": "en",
  "description": "NASA selected three companies on Wednesday to perform work to develop Ka-band space relay capability concepts that are compatible with current missions in",
  "leadImage": "https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/nasa_meatball_large.jpg",
  "images": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/nasa_meatball_large.jpg",
      "alt": "NASA insignia."
    }
  ],
  "imageCount": 1,
  "wordCount": 290,
  "readingTimeMinutes": 1,
  "summary": "NASA selected three companies on Wednesday to perform work to develop Ka-band space relay capability concepts that are compatible with current missions in space, ensuring service continuity for existing spacecraft without requiring modifications to their onboard systems. Through this work, NASA will...",
  "text": "NASA selected three companies on Wednesday to perform work to develop Ka-band space relay capability concepts that are compatible with current missions in space, ensuring service continuity for existing spacecraft without requiring modifications to their onboard systems.\n\nThrough this work, NASA wil...",
  "markdown": "![NASA insignia.](https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/nasa_meatball_large.jpg?w=1920)\n\nNASA selected three companies on Wednesday to perform work to develop Ka-band space relay capability concepts that are compatible with current missions in space, ensuring service continuity for existin...",
  "articleType": null,
  "paywalled": null,
  "authorSource": "meta",
  "robotsContentSignals": null,
  "source": "input",
  "sourceUrl": null,
  "httpStatus": 200,
  "fetchMs": 586,
  "extractedAt": "2026-11-04T23:01:28Z"
}

articleType is the schema.org type when the page declares one, paywalled is set when the publisher marks the article as paid, and source is input or discovery. Pages that were skipped (robots.txt, 403/404, not an article) are listed with the reason in the run's key-value store under SUMMARY.

How much does it cost?

You pay $0.90 per 1,000 articles extracted, plus a $0.00005 start fee per run. Skipped pages are free.

• 100 coverage links: about $0.09.
• 50 articles a day from feeds for a month (1,500): about $1.35.
• 20,000 articles for a research dataset: about $18.

Volume discounts on higher Apify plans. The prices above are for the Apify Free plan. On paid plans the per-result price drops automatically: about 15% lower on Bronze, 25% lower on Silver and 38% lower on Gold and above.

Use it via API, Make, Zapier, n8n or an AI agent

Apify API. Start a run and get the results back in one HTTP request (replace YOUR_API_TOKEN with the token from Apify Console > Settings > Integrations):

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/plotpointtech~news-article-extractor/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"articleUrls": ["https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-announces-ka-band-satellite-relay-awards-for-space-communications/", "https://theconversation.com/why-do-galaxies-rotate-291508"], "discoveryUrls": ["https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/feed/"], "maxArticlesPerSource": 10, "summarySentences": 3}'

For longer jobs, start the run asynchronously and read the dataset when it finishes. Official apify-client libraries exist for Python and JavaScript; the API tab on this page has ready-made code.

No-code automation. Connect the tool to Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets, Slack, Airtable or any webhook with Apify integrations, and use Schedules in Apify Console to run it hourly, daily or weekly.

AI agents (MCP). Give Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code or any MCP-compatible agent direct access to this tool through the hosted Apify MCP server. Add this server URL to your client:

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

The agent can then call the tool with the same input fields shown above and read the results.

FAQ

Is it legal to extract news articles? The tool only reads public pages at the URLs you supply (or that a site lists in its own feeds and sitemaps), always obeys robots.txt and never bypasses paywalls, logins or bot protection. Article text and images are protected by copyright and by each publisher's terms; you are responsible for using them lawfully, for example for analysis, monitoring or with a license, and for linking rather than republishing. Check each site's terms and the robotsContentSignals field.

What happens with paywalled articles? Nothing is bypassed. If the publisher marks the article as not free (isAccessibleForFree: false), the paywalled sections it declares are removed, paywalled is true, and you get only what the site shows to everyone. If the page has too little text, it is skipped and not charged.

Why was a URL skipped? The site's robots.txt disallowed it, the server refused the request (often 401/403 bot protection, which we do not work around), the page was not found, or it had fewer words than minWordCount (index pages, consent walls). See SUMMARY in the key-value store.

Does it render JavaScript? No. It reads the HTML the server sends, which works for almost all news sites and blogs and keeps it fast and cheap. Pages that build their text only in the browser may be skipped.

Which languages are supported? Any. Language comes from the page markup or is detected from the text. Word counts treat Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters sensibly.

Is the summary AI-generated? No. It selects the article's most representative sentences, so it never invents facts.

Related tools from Plot Point Technologies

• Website to Markdown Crawler for AI, LLM & RAG - $1/1K: any website as clean Markdown for LLMs and RAG.

• Google News Scraper - Articles with Real Publisher URLs: Google News articles with decoded publisher URLs.

• News Scraper - Worldwide News Search by Keyword, 65+ Languages: news articles worldwide by keyword, country and language.

• AI Web Scraper - Extract Any Website to JSON in Plain English: describe the fields you want and get JSON from any web page.

• RSS Feed Reader & Monitor: any RSS, Atom or JSON feed to JSON, with only-new monitoring.

Plot Point Technologies is not affiliated with any of the publishers mentioned on this page.

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If this tool saved you time, we would be grateful for a short review on this page; it helps other people find it. If something did not work as expected, please open an issue on the Issues tab and we will look into it quickly.