> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.reader.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Main content extraction

> How Reader strips boilerplate and when to turn it off.

By default Reader strips navigation, footers, sidebars, cookie banners, newsletter pop-ups, and other boilerplate, keeping just the article body. This is the `onlyMainContent: true` default.

For most use cases (LLM pipelines, RAG indexing, clean markdown output for humans) this is what you want. Boilerplate is noise and tokens.

## Leave it on (the default)

```ts theme={null}
await reader.read({ url: "https://example.com/blog/post" });
// Returns the article only, no "Sign up for our newsletter" CTA in your LLM context
```

## Turn it off

```ts theme={null}
await reader.read({
  url: "https://example.com/blog/post",
  onlyMainContent: false,
});
```

When to:

* **You want the nav bar's links.** For example, you're scraping a docs homepage specifically to find every sub-page link, so you need the full navigation.
* **There is no "article" on the page.** Landing pages, pricing pages, homepages: these are all content, so there's nothing to strip.
* **You're debugging.** "Reader dropped the section I wanted". Turn main-content off to confirm what the page actually contains, then turn it back on with `excludeTags` to remove what you don't want.

## How it works

Reader uses heuristics similar to Mozilla's Readability algorithm: scoring DOM nodes by the density of text, the presence of typical article markers (`<article>`, `<main>`, schema.org markers), and penalizing nodes that look like navigation or ads. The result is usually the element the human eye would pick as "the content".

It's heuristic, not magic. On pages with unusual layouts (very long sidebars, unconventional HTML) you may need to combine it with [Include and exclude selectors](/home/guides/getting-started/selectors) to get exactly what you want.

## Next

* [Include and exclude selectors](/home/guides/getting-started/selectors)
* [Formats and extraction](/home/concepts/formats-and-extraction)