webclaw

The fastest web scraper for AI agents.
_{67% fewer tokens. Sub-millisecond extraction. Zero browser overhead.}

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_{Claude Code's built-in web_fetch → 403 Forbidden. webclaw → clean markdown.}

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Your AI agent calls fetch() and gets a 403. Or 142KB of raw HTML that burns through your token budget. webclaw fixes both.

It extracts clean, structured content from any URL using Chrome-level TLS fingerprinting — no headless browser, no Selenium, no Puppeteer. Output is optimized for LLMs: 67% fewer tokens than raw HTML, with metadata, links, and images preserved.

                     Raw HTML                          webclaw
┌──────────────────────────────────┐    ┌──────────────────────────────────┐
│ <div class="ad-wrapper">         │    │ # Breaking: AI Breakthrough      │
│ <nav class="global-nav">         │    │                                  │
│ <script>window.__NEXT_DATA__     │    │ Researchers achieved 94%         │
│ ={...8KB of JSON...}</script>    │    │ accuracy on cross-domain         │
│ <div class="social-share">       │    │ reasoning benchmarks.            │
│ <button>Tweet</button>           │    │                                  │
│ <footer class="site-footer">     │    │ ## Key Findings                  │
│ <!-- 142,847 characters -->      │    │ - 3x faster inference            │
│                                  │    │ - Open-source weights            │
│         4,820 tokens             │    │         1,590 tokens             │
└──────────────────────────────────┘    └──────────────────────────────────┘

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Two ways to use webclaw

Self-host. Free, AGPL-3.0, runs locally. Get the CLI, MCP server, or REST API in one command. Ships with the 8 core extraction tools: scrape, crawl, map, batch, extract, summarize, diff, brand.

Hosted API at webclaw.io. Start with a 7-day Starter trial, card required. Adds what self-hosting can't do alone: antibot bypass (Cloudflare, DataDome, WAF), JS rendering, async crawl/research jobs, web search, watches. For when you want it to just work.

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Get Started (30 seconds)

For AI agents (Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code)

npx create-webclaw

Auto-detects your AI tools, downloads the MCP server, and configures everything. One command.

Homebrew (macOS/Linux)

brew tap 0xMassi/webclaw
brew install webclaw

Prebuilt binaries

Download from GitHub Releases for macOS (arm64, x86_64) and Linux (x86_64, aarch64).

Cargo (from source)

cargo install --git https://github.com/0xMassi/webclaw.git webclaw-cli
cargo install --git https://github.com/0xMassi/webclaw.git webclaw-mcp

webclaw uses BoringSSL (via boring-sys2) for TLS fingerprinting, which needs a few system packages at build time. If cargo install panics with a boring-sys2 build error or Unable to find libclang, install the prerequisites first:

OS	Install command
Debian / Ubuntu	sudo apt install -y pkg-config libssl-dev cmake clang git build-essential
Fedora / RHEL	sudo dnf install -y pkg-config openssl-devel cmake clang git make gcc
Arch	sudo pacman -S pkg-config openssl cmake clang git base-devel
macOS	xcode-select --install (and Xcode CLT covers everything)

If you do not want to manage build dependencies yourself, prefer the Homebrew, Docker, or Prebuilt binaries options above.

Docker

docker run --rm ghcr.io/0xmassi/webclaw https://example.com

Docker Compose (with Ollama for LLM features)

cp env.example .env
docker compose up -d

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Why webclaw?

	webclaw	Firecrawl	Trafilatura	Readability
Extraction accuracy	95.1%	—	80.6%	83.5%
Token efficiency	-67%	—	-55%	-51%
Speed (100KB page)	3.2ms	~500ms	18.4ms	8.7ms
TLS fingerprinting	Yes	No	No	No
Self-hosted	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
MCP (Claude/Cursor)	Yes	No	No	No
No browser required	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Cost	Free	$$$$	Free	Free

Choose webclaw if you want fast local extraction, LLM-optimized output, and native AI agent integration.

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What it looks like

$ webclaw https://stripe.com -f llm

> URL: https://stripe.com
> Title: Stripe | Financial Infrastructure for the Internet
> Language: en
> Word count: 847

# Stripe | Financial Infrastructure for the Internet

Stripe is a suite of APIs powering online payment processing
and commerce solutions for internet businesses of all sizes.

## Products
- Payments — Accept payments online and in person
- Billing — Manage subscriptions and invoicing
- Connect — Build a marketplace or platform
...

$ webclaw https://github.com --brand

{
  "name": "GitHub",
  "colors": [{"hex": "#59636E", "usage": "Primary"}, ...],
  "fonts": ["Mona Sans", "ui-monospace"],
  "logos": [{"url": "https://github.githubassets.com/...", "kind": "svg"}]
}

$ webclaw https://docs.rust-lang.org --crawl --depth 2 --max-pages 50

Crawling... 50/50 pages extracted
---
# Page 1: https://docs.rust-lang.org/
...
# Page 2: https://docs.rust-lang.org/book/
...

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MCP Server — 10 tools for AI agents

webclaw ships as an MCP server that plugs into Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenCode, Antigravity, Codex CLI, and any MCP-compatible client.

npx create-webclaw    # auto-detects and configures everything

Or manual setup — add to your Claude Desktop config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "webclaw": {
      "command": "~/.webclaw/webclaw-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Then in Claude: "Scrape the top 5 results for 'web scraping tools' and compare their pricing" — it just works.

Available tools

Tool	Description	Requires API key?
scrape	Extract content from any URL	No
crawl	Recursive site crawl	No
map	Discover URLs from sitemaps	No
batch	Parallel multi-URL extraction	No
extract	LLM-powered structured extraction	No (needs Ollama)
summarize	Page summarization	No (needs Ollama)
diff	Content change detection	No
brand	Brand identity extraction	No
search	Web search + scrape results	Yes
research	Deep multi-source research	Yes

8 of 10 tools work locally — no account, no API key, fully private.

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Features

Extraction

• Readability scoring — multi-signal content detection (text density, semantic tags, link ratio)
• Noise filtering — strips nav, footer, ads, modals, cookie banners (Tailwind-safe)
• Data island extraction — catches React/Next.js JSON payloads, JSON-LD, hydration data
• YouTube metadata — structured data from any YouTube video
• PDF extraction — auto-detected via Content-Type
• 5 output formats — markdown, text, JSON, LLM-optimized, HTML

Content control

webclaw URL --include "article, .content"       # CSS selector include
webclaw URL --exclude "nav, footer, .sidebar"    # CSS selector exclude
webclaw URL --only-main-content                  # Auto-detect main content

Crawling

webclaw URL --crawl --depth 3 --max-pages 100   # BFS same-origin crawl
webclaw URL --crawl --sitemap                    # Seed from sitemap
webclaw URL --map                                # Discover URLs only

LLM features (Ollama / OpenAI / Anthropic)

webclaw URL --summarize                          # Page summary
webclaw URL --extract-prompt "Get all prices"    # Natural language extraction
webclaw URL --extract-json '{"type":"object"}'   # Schema-enforced extraction

Change tracking

webclaw URL -f json > snap.json                  # Take snapshot
webclaw URL --diff-with snap.json                # Compare later

Brand extraction

webclaw URL --brand                              # Colors, fonts, logos, OG image

Proxy rotation

webclaw URL --proxy http://user:pass@host:port   # Single proxy
webclaw URLs --proxy-file proxies.txt            # Pool rotation

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Benchmarks

All numbers from real tests on 50 diverse pages. See benchmarks/ for methodology and reproduction instructions.

Extraction quality

Accuracy      webclaw     ███████████████████ 95.1%
              readability ████████████████▋   83.5%
              trafilatura ████████████████    80.6%
              newspaper3k █████████████▎      66.4%

Noise removal webclaw     ███████████████████ 96.1%
              readability █████████████████▊  89.4%
              trafilatura ██████████████████▏ 91.2%
              newspaper3k ███████████████▎    76.8%

Speed (pure extraction, no network)

10KB page     webclaw     ██                   0.8ms
              readability █████                2.1ms
              trafilatura ██████████           4.3ms

100KB page    webclaw     ██                   3.2ms
              readability █████                8.7ms
              trafilatura ██████████           18.4ms

Token efficiency (feeding to Claude/GPT)

Format	Tokens	vs Raw HTML
Raw HTML	4,820	baseline
readability	2,340	-51%
trafilatura	2,180	-55%
webclaw llm	1,590	-67%

Crawl speed

Concurrency	webclaw	Crawl4AI	Scrapy
5	9.8 pg/s	5.2 pg/s	7.1 pg/s
10	18.4 pg/s	8.7 pg/s	12.3 pg/s
20	32.1 pg/s	14.2 pg/s	21.8 pg/s

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Architecture

webclaw/
  crates/
    webclaw-core     Pure extraction engine. Zero network deps. WASM-safe.
    webclaw-fetch    HTTP client + TLS fingerprinting (wreq/BoringSSL). Crawler. Batch ops.
    webclaw-llm      LLM provider chain (Ollama -> OpenAI -> Anthropic)
    webclaw-pdf      PDF text extraction
    webclaw-mcp      MCP server (10 tools for AI agents)
    webclaw-cli      CLI binary

webclaw-core takes raw HTML as a &str and returns structured output. No I/O, no network, no allocator tricks. Can compile to WASM.

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Configuration

Variable	Description
WEBCLAW_API_KEY	Cloud API key (enables bot bypass, JS rendering, search, research)
OLLAMA_HOST	Ollama URL for local LLM features (default: http://localhost:11434)
OPENAI_API_KEY	OpenAI API key for LLM features
OPENAI_BASE_URL	OpenAI-compatible base URL (default: https://api.openai.com/v1)
OPENAI_RESPONSE_FORMAT_TYPE	JSON-mode response format for OpenAI-compatible backends: json_object (default), json_schema, or text. Use text or json_schema for LM Studio.
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY	Anthropic API key for LLM features
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL	Anthropic-compatible base URL (default: https://api.anthropic.com/v1)
WEBCLAW_PROXY	Single proxy URL
WEBCLAW_PROXY_FILE	Path to proxy pool file

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Cloud API (optional)

For bot-protected sites, JS rendering, and advanced features, webclaw offers a hosted API at webclaw.io.

The CLI and MCP server work locally first. Cloud is used as a fallback when:

• A site has bot protection (Cloudflare, DataDome, WAF)
• A page requires JavaScript rendering
• You use search or research tools

export WEBCLAW_API_KEY=wc_your_key

# Automatic: tries local first, cloud on bot detection
webclaw https://protected-site.com

# Force cloud
webclaw --cloud https://spa-site.com

SDKs

npm install @webclaw/sdk                  # TypeScript/JavaScript
pip install webclaw                        # Python
go get github.com/0xMassi/webclaw-go      # Go

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Use cases

• AI agents — Give Claude/Cursor/GPT real-time web access via MCP
• Research — Crawl documentation, competitor sites, news archives
• Price monitoring — Track changes with --diff-with snapshots
• Training data — Prepare web content for fine-tuning with token-optimized output
• Content pipelines — Batch extract + summarize in CI/CD
• Brand intelligence — Extract visual identity from any website

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Community

• Discord — questions, feedback, show what you built
• GitHub Issues — bug reports and feature requests

Contributing

We welcome contributions! See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

• Good first issues
• Architecture docs

Acknowledgments

TLS and HTTP/2 browser fingerprinting is powered by wreq and http2 by @0x676e67, who pioneered browser-grade HTTP/2 fingerprinting in Rust.

Star History

License

AGPL-3.0