Safety Gate (RAPEX) Scraper

Extract product recall and safety alert data from the EU's Safety Gate system, formerly known as RAPEX. This is the official EU rapid alert system for dangerous non-food products — everything from exploding phone chargers to toys with excessive lead content.

How it works

When you search by keyword, the scraper uses the Safety Gate JSON API directly (/api/alerts), which is fast and returns clean data with pagination. When you provide listing page URLs or run without input, it falls back to crawling the HTML pages and following links to individual alert detail pages.

Both approaches end up with the same structured output.

Input

Field	Type	Description
searchQuery	String	Keyword to search alerts. Examples: "charger", "toy", "cosmetics", "children clothing"
startUrls	Array	Safety Gate pages to start from. Example: https://ec.europa.eu/safety-gate-alerts/screen/webReport
maxResults	Integer	Default: 100
proxyConfiguration	Object	Optional.

What's in each alert

{
    "title": "USB-C charger",
    "alertNumber": "A12/01234/26",
    "category": "Electrical appliances and equipment",
    "riskLevel": "Serious",
    "notifyingCountry": "Germany",
    "date": "2026-03-01",
    "brand": "Generic",
    "productType": "Charger",
    "countryOfOrigin": "China",
    "measures": "Withdrawal from the market, Recall from consumers",
    "description": "The charger does not comply with the requirements of the Low Voltage Directive...",
    "imageUrl": "https://ec.europa.eu/safety-gate-alerts/...",
    "url": "https://ec.europa.eu/safety-gate-alerts/screen/webReport/alertDetail/A12/01234/26",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-03-16T08:00:00.000Z"
}

Available fields: title, alertNumber, category, riskLevel, notifyingCountry, date, brand, productType, countryOfOrigin, measures, description, imageUrl, url.

Use cases

Product compliance / import screening — If you import consumer goods into the EU, you should be checking Safety Gate regularly. This scraper lets you automate that. Set up a scheduled run with a keyword matching your product category and pipe the results into a spreadsheet or Slack channel.

Market surveillance research — Analyze which product categories generate the most recalls, which countries of origin appear most often, or how recall patterns change over time.

Journalist / consumer watchdog — Build alerts for new recalls in specific categories (e.g. children's products, electronics, cosmetics).

Technical notes

• The Safety Gate API returns paginated results (50 per page). The scraper handles pagination automatically.
• Alert numbers follow the format A12/XXXXX/YY where A12 is the notification type and YY is the year.
• Some older alerts may have fewer fields populated than recent ones.