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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: 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 any combination:
The response includes whichever fields you asked for:
Screenshots are full-page captures. They bypass the cache since each capture is unique. The screenshot field is a base64-encoded PNG string that you decode on the client side.

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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:
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.
  • 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:
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:
  • 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: which mode ran ("standard" or "premium"). 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