Scraping

1. Fetch - Reader renders the page in a headless Chrome browser (Playwright engine) with JavaScript execution and proxy routing. See Scraping Engine.
2. Extract - Reader identifies the main content area (article, main, largest text block), removes navigation, footers, sidebars, ads, and hidden elements.
3. Convert - the cleaned HTML is converted to markdown via supermarkdown (a Rust-backed converter optimized for LLM input).

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The scrape() primitive

const result = await reader.scrape({
  urls: ["https://example.com"],
  formats: ["markdown"],
});

console.log(result.data[0].markdown);

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Output formats

• markdown - cleaned, LLM-optimized markdown (default)
• html - the cleaned HTML that markdown was generated from

const result = await reader.scrape({
  urls: ["https://example.com"],
  formats: ["markdown", "html"],
});

console.log(result.data[0].markdown);
console.log(result.data[0].html);

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What scraping is not

• Crawling - scrape() only visits URLs you explicitly pass. It does not discover links. For that, use crawl().
• Screenshots or PDFs - Reader is text-first. It does not produce rendered images of pages.
• A JavaScript execution environment - while the Playwright engine runs JavaScript, Reader doesn’t expose the page object or let you run arbitrary browser scripts. It’s a scraping tool, not a general-purpose browser automation framework.

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Where to go next