AOL News & Lifestyle Article Scraper

Extract complete articles from AOL.com across every content section, News, Politics, Entertainment, Finance, Health, Shopping, Style, Travel, and more, with full body text, every image, and full threaded reader comments. Run it on demand, on a schedule, or through the Apify API to keep a feed of fresh AOL content flowing into your own pipeline.

What does AOL News & Lifestyle Article Scraper do?

This Actor crawls the category listing pages you choose on aol.com, follows every article link it finds, and opens each article to extract its full detail: headline, author, publisher, publish and update timestamps, complete body text, every embedded image, and any embedded video. It also pulls the full comment thread for each article, commenter display name and comment text, not just a count, using AOL's own comment platform, so you get real reader discussion, not a summary number.

It runs on plain HTTP requests (no headless browser needed), which keeps runs fast and inexpensive. Schedule it on Apify to get a continuously refreshed dataset, pull results through the Apify API or MCP, or export straight to CSV/JSON/Excel.

Why use AOL News & Lifestyle Article Scraper?

• Media monitoring - track how AOL's syndicated network (USA Today, Reuters, The Independent, and others) covers a topic across categories.
• Sentiment and community research - full comment threads with real usernames and text let you study reader reaction, not just engagement counts.
• Content aggregation - pull structured article data into your own news app, newsletter, or research dataset.
• Historical archiving - keep a searchable, structured record of articles that would otherwise disappear from AOL's own listings over time.

How to use AOL News & Lifestyle Article Scraper

1. Click Try for free (or Start) on the Actor page.
2. In the Input tab, pick one or more categories (or leave the list empty to crawl all of them).
3. Adjust how many articles per category and in total you want, and whether to include full comment threads.
4. Click Start and watch the run progress.
5. When it finishes, open the Output tab to browse results as a table, or export as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML.

Input

Field	Type	Description
categories	array	Which AOL.com sections to crawl (e.g. news-politics, entertainment, shopping). Leave empty to crawl every section.
articlesPerCategory	integer	Max recent article links to collect per category listing page (default 15, max 50).
maxTotalArticles	integer	Overall cap on articles scraped in one run, across all selected categories (default 100, max 2000).
includeComments	boolean	Whether to fetch full comment threads per article (default true).
maxCommentsPerArticle	integer	Max top-level comments (with replies) fetched per article (default 25, max 200).

See the Input tab for the full schema and live examples.

Output

Each dataset item is one article. Example (trimmed):

{
  "url": "https://www.aol.com/articles/example-headline-123456000.html",
  "category": "news-politics",
  "headline": "Example headline",
  "author": "Jane Reporter, USA TODAY",
  "provider": "USA TODAY",
  "publishedAt": "2026-08-17T20:19:56+00:00",
  "bodyText": "Full article text goes here...",
  "images": ["https://hermes.media.static.aol.com/media/.../photo.jpg"],
  "videos": [],
  "commentsCount": 15,
  "messagesCount": 26,
  "comments": [
    {
      "commentId": "sp_IjnMf2Jd_...",
      "parentCommentId": null,
      "depth": 0,
      "authorName": "Jane D.",
      "text": "This is a top-level comment.",
      "publishedAt": 1787006600,
      "upvotes": 8,
      "downvotes": 6,
      "repliesCount": 4
    }
  ]
}

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

Data table

Field	Description
headline, description	Article title and dek
author, provider	Byline and original publisher (AOL syndicates a lot of content)
publishedAt, modifiedAt	Timestamps
bodyText	Full article body as plain text
images, videos	Every media URL found in the article, directly downloadable
keywords	Article tags, when present
comments	Full threaded comments: author, text, votes, reply depth

Pricing / Cost estimation

This Actor is pay-per-result at $2.5 per 1,000 articles scraped, priced below comparable general-purpose news scrapers on Apify Store. Because it uses plain HTTP requests instead of a browser, runs are fast and use very little compute, so most runs finish well within the free plan's monthly usage.

Tips

• Turn off includeComments for a large, comments-not-needed run - it roughly doubles the requests per article, so skipping it speeds up large batches.
• The same story often appears in more than one category (e.g. a politics story also linked from the homepage); maxTotalArticles dedupes by URL so you never pay for the same article twice in one run.
• Schedule the Actor daily or hourly to build a continuously growing archive, then dedupe downstream by url or postId.

FAQ, disclaimers, and support

This Actor only extracts content that AOL already serves publicly to any visitor's browser; it does not bypass any login, paywall, or access control. Use of scraped data is your responsibility, review AOL's Terms of Service for your use case. AOL's own on-site search box forwards to Yahoo's general web search (a separate product, not AOL content search), so no dedicated AOL keyword-search Actor exists, use the categories input to scope what this Actor crawls instead.

Found a bug or have a feature request? Use the Issues tab on this Actor's page. Need a custom variant (extra fields, a different site section, deeper comment pagination)? Reach out through the same tab.