Article Extractor - Clean Text, Author, Date & Image

Disclaimer: This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the owners of any website, service or document it processes. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Any site or brand names are referenced only to describe the content this Actor processes.

Give it a list of article, blog or news URLs and get the clean article back for each - stripped of nav, ads, cookie banners and related-links clutter with Mozilla's Readability engine (the same algorithm behind Firefox Reader View). For every URL you get the title, author/byline, publish date, excerpt, lead image, tags, site name, language, word count, reading time and the full article text.

Pure HTTP + parsing, no browser - fast and cents per article. Perfect for feeding clean content to an LLM (RAG), archiving, content analysis or building a reading list.

What you get per URL

title · byline (author) · publishedTime · modifiedTime · excerpt · leadImageUrl · siteName · lang · section · tags[] · canonical · textContent (clean full text) · wordCount · readingTimeMinutes · charCount · isArticle · optional contentHtml.

A URL that is unreachable or has no extractable article body is reported (status: "failed" or isArticle: false) and is not charged.

Input

{
  "urls": [
    "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
    "https://blog.example.com/some-post"
  ],
  "includeHtml": false
}

• URLs - one per line; a bare domain gets https://. Leave empty for a small free sample.
• Import URLs from a file - paste a list, or link a public .txt/.csv, a Google Sheet/Drive link, or an Apify key-value-store record.
• Include cleaned content HTML - add the article body as HTML on top of the plain text.
• Output fields - tick only the columns you need for a lean export.

Notes

• Reads the server-rendered HTML. Pages that render their article entirely client-side (rare for articles, which want to be crawlable) may return little text - use a proxy or a browser-based scraper for those.
• readingTimeMinutes assumes ~220 words per minute.

How much does it cost?

This Actor uses Apify's pay-per-event pricing: you are charged only for the results it delivers, with no monthly rental and no start fee. The events it can charge are:

• Article extracted - One article extracted: clean text, title, author, date, excerpt, lead image, tags and reading time. Only successful extractions are charged.

The current price of each event is shown on the Pricing tab of this page. Set a maximum total charge on the run if you want a hard cap on spend, and use the input limits to control how much the Actor fetches.

Use with AI assistants (MCP)

Available through the Apify MCP server - an agent can pull clean article text for retrieval-augmented generation, summarisation, or a research pipeline without the surrounding page noise.

Agent-ready: autonomous payments (x402 & Skyfire)

This actor is agent-ready - AI agents can discover it, run it, and pay for it autonomously, with no Apify account and no human in the loop. It uses pay-per-event pricing and limited permissions, so it qualifies for Apify's agentic-payment standards:

• x402 - an open, HTTP-native payment protocol. Agents pay per run in USDC on the Base network directly through the Apify MCP server - no account, no API key.
• Skyfire - agent-to-service payments for fully autonomous AI-agent workflows.

Building an AI agent, MCP tool, or autonomous data pipeline? This scraper is ready to plug in and pay as it goes.

Automate & schedule

Run this Actor on autopilot and pull results into your own stack:

• Apify API - start runs, fetch datasets and manage schedules over REST.
• apify-client for JavaScript and apify-client for Python - official SDKs.
• Schedules - run it hourly, daily or weekly and keep your dataset current.
• Webhooks - trigger downstream actions (CRM import, Slack alert, email sequence) the moment a run finishes.

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'MY_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('scrapesage/article-extractor').call({
    "urls": [
        "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping"
    ]
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(`Got ${items.length} records`);

Integrate with any app

Connect the dataset to thousands of apps - no code required:

• Make - multi-step automation scenarios.
• Zapier - push new records straight into your CRM or spreadsheet.
• Slack - get notified when a scheduled run finds something new.
• Google Drive / Sheets - auto-export every run to a spreadsheet.
• Airbyte - pipe results into your data warehouse.
• GitHub - trigger runs from commits or releases.

FAQ

How is this Actor billed? Pay-per-event: you pay only for the results it delivers, with no monthly rental and no start fee. The per-event price is shown on the Pricing tab.

Can I schedule it and get results automatically? Yes - create a Schedule and add a webhook or an integration (Google Sheets, Slack, Make, Zapier) to push each run's dataset wherever you need it.

Which export formats are available? Every run's dataset can be downloaded as JSON, CSV, Excel (XLSX), XML, HTML or RSS from the Apify Console or the API.

Can I run it from code or an AI agent? Yes - through the Apify API and client libraries, or from Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants via the Apify MCP server.

Is it legal to use this Actor? This Actor collects publicly available data only. You are responsible for using the output in compliance with applicable laws (including data-protection law where personal data is involved) and the source's terms. See the Disclaimer below.

Disclaimer

This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the owners of any website, service or document it processes. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

Any website, service or brand names that appear in this listing or in the output are referenced only in a descriptive, nominative sense. This Actor is not an official product of any of them and is not authorised or certified by them. It processes only content you point it at; you are responsible for ensuring you may lawfully access and use that content and that your use complies with applicable laws and the terms of each source.

Need help?

Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab, or visit the Apify help center. Feature requests are welcome - this Actor is actively maintained.