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Reader turns HTML into something an LLM (or your code) can actually read. You control two things: the format Reader gives you back, and how aggressively it extracts the meaningful part of the page.

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Formats

Pass formats on the request to choose what comes back:
ValueWhat you get
"markdown" (default)Clean, structured markdown. Headings, lists, links, code blocks preserved. Best for LLMs and RAG.
"html"The cleaned HTML Reader used as the source for markdown conversion. Useful when you need to run your own DOM parsing.
Every response also includes rawHtml — the unprocessed HTML exactly as the browser rendered it, before any cleaning or content extraction. This is always returned regardless of formats. You can request both: 
{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "formats": ["markdown", "html"]
}
The response includes whichever fields you asked for: 
{
  "data": {
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "rawHtml": "<html><head>...</head><body>...</body></html>",
    "markdown": "# Example Domain\n\n...",
    "html": "<h1>Example Domain</h1>...",
    "metadata": { /* ... */ }
  }
}

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Main content extraction

By default Reader strips away navigation, footers, sidebars, cookie banners, newsletter pop-ups, and other boilerplate, keeping just the article body. This is the onlyMainContent: true default. Turn it off when you need the whole page: 
{ "url": "...", "onlyMainContent": false }
When to turn it off:
  • You want the nav bar’s links (e.g., to find related pages)
  • You’re scraping a landing page where there is no “article”
  • You’re debugging why something was stripped
When to leave it on (most of the time):
  • LLM pipelines: boilerplate is noise and tokens
  • RAG indexing: you don’t want “Cookie Settings” matching your user’s query
  • Clean markdown output for humans

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Include and exclude selectors

For finer control, give Reader a list of CSS selectors to keep or drop. These compose with onlyMainContent. 
{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "includeTags": ["article", "main.content"],
  "excludeTags": [".ads", "#newsletter-modal", "aside"]
}
  • includeTags: keep only content matching these selectors. Everything else is dropped.
  • excludeTags: drop anything matching these, keep the rest.
If you pass both, includeTags runs first, then excludeTags trims what remains.

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Wait for a selector

Dynamic pages sometimes render the real content a moment after the initial load. For example, a product grid that’s hydrated from JSON. Tell Reader to wait for a specific selector before capturing: 
{
  "url": "https://shop.example.com/search?q=phone",
  "waitForSelector": ".product-card"
}
Reader returns once that selector appears or the per-request timeoutMs is hit, whichever comes first.

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What’s in metadata

Every scrape result includes metadata about the page and the request: 
{
  "metadata": {
    "title": "Example Domain",
    "description": "This domain is for illustrative examples.",
    "statusCode": 200,
    "duration": 487,
    "cached": false,
    "proxyMode": "standard",
    "proxyEscalated": false,
    "scrapedAt": "2026-04-04T12:00:00Z"
  }
}
  • title, description: extracted from <title>, <meta> tags, or Open Graph data
  • statusCode: what the target site returned
  • duration: how long Reader spent on the request, in ms
  • cached: whether the content was served from Reader’s cache
  • proxyMode, proxyEscalated: see Proxy modes
  • scrapedAt: when the content was captured

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Next

  • Proxy modes: how Reader decides to fetch a page
  • Caching: when to reuse a previous result