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📰 Smart Article Extractor

🚀 Parse any news article or blog post into clean structured text in seconds. Get 23 metadata fields per article including authors, tags, publish date, lead image, paywall flag, and reading time. No API key, no registration, no manual parser maintenance.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-04-21 · 📊 23 fields per article · 🌐 Works on any site · ⚡ 10 articles in ~10 seconds · 💰 Paywall detection

Copy to your AI assistant

Copy this block into ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, or any LLM to start using this actor.

parseforge/article-extractor on Apify. Call: ApifyClient("TOKEN").actor("parseforge/article-extractor").call(run_input={...}), then client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).list_items().items for results. Key inputs: startUrls (array, default [{"url":"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c86w8elez74o"}]), maxItems (integer, default 10). Full actor spec: fetch build via GET https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/parseforge~article-extractor (Bearer TOKEN). Get token: https://console.apify.com/account/integrations

The Smart Article Extractor takes any article URL and returns the main body as clean Markdown alongside 22 metadata fields. It scores DOM nodes by paragraph count, word count, and link density to identify the main content block, then strips navigation, sidebars, and ads. Author, tags, section, publishedAt, modifiedAt, and canonical URL are pulled from meta tags, JSON-LD, and itemprop attributes.

Extras include a paywall-detection heuristic, inline image collection, lead image (Open Graph), language detection, word count, and reading time. Concurrent fetching keeps 10 articles flying in parallel, so a list of 100 news URLs finishes in about 15 seconds. Works out of the box on most major news sites, blogs, and publishing platforms.

📋 What the Smart Article Extractor does

Five extraction workflows in a single run:

• 📝 Main body extraction. DOM scoring isolates the article content and strips navigation, ads, and sidebars.
• 👥 Author detection. Pulls authors from meta tags, JSON-LD, and itemprop attributes.
• 📅 Date stamps. Captures both article:published_time and article:modified_time.
• 🏷️ Tags and section. Extracts article:tag and article:section metadata.
• 💰 Paywall flag. Heuristic detects common paywall markers so you can filter downstream.

Every record also includes the canonical URL, lead image, inline images, word count, reading time, language, site name, HTTP status, and timestamp.

💡 Why it matters: news sites each have their own HTML structure. Writing per-site parsers is brittle and breaks every time a publisher redesigns their pages. This Actor uses readability-style scoring that works across any article-shaped page.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing extraction across news sites, blogs, and platforms.

⚙️ Input

Example: extract a single article.

{
"startUrls":[
{"url":"https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/10/openai-launches-gpt-store/"}
],
"maxItems":1
}

Example: batch extraction for media monitoring.

{
"startUrls":[
{"url":"https://www.theverge.com/2025/ai-coverage-1"},
{"url":"https://www.wired.com/story/ai-agents-2026"},
{"url":"https://arstechnica.com/ai/article"}
],
"maxItems":100
}

⚠️ Good to Know: works best on article-shaped pages (one headline, one author, one body). Homepages, category pages, and list views return thin extractions because there is no single article to score.

📊 Output

Each record contains 23 fields. Download the dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🧾 Schema

📦 Sample records

✨ Why choose this Actor

📊 Clean article text is the foundation of news summarization, sentiment analysis, and media monitoring. This Actor delivers it consistently without per-site parsers.

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Pick this Actor when you want article text from arbitrary URLs without maintaining your own extraction library.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the Smart Article Extractor page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Paste URLs. Add article URLs to the startUrls field and set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor extract the content.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

💼 Business use cases

🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt about this ParseForge actor in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🔌 Automating Smart Article Extractor

Control the scraper programmatically for scheduled runs and pipeline integrations:

• 🟢 Node.js. Install the apify-client NPM package.
• 🐍 Python. Use the apify-client PyPI package.
• 📚 See the Apify API documentation for full details.

The Apify Schedules feature lets you trigger this Actor on any cron interval. Pair it with an RSS reader or Google News feed for continuous media monitoring.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Smart Article Extractor connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Post article summaries to channels
• Airbyte - Pipe articles into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits
• Google Drive - Export articles to Docs

You can also use webhooks to trigger summarization and alerting pipelines when new articles finish extracting.

🔗 Recommended Actors

• 🤖 RAG Web Browser - Search or fetch URLs with LLM-ready output
• 🕸️ Website Content Crawler - Deep-crawl a domain with depth control
• 🔍 Google Search Scraper - SERP results with rank and description
• 📈 Google Trends Scraper - Interest over time and related queries
• 📧 Contact Info Scraper - Emails, phones, and socials from URLs

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more content-extraction tools.

🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form to request a new scraper, propose a custom data project, or report an issue.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with any publisher, news outlet, or readability library. Only publicly accessible article URLs are processed. Respect the copyright and terms of service of every publisher you extract from.