📰 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.

Pull structured records from Smart Article Extractor — clean fields ready as CSV, JSON, JSONL, Excel, or XML for downstream pipelines.

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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.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
News aggregators, media monitoring teams, AI app developers, content researchers, data journalists, archivists	News datasets, summarization pipelines, media monitoring, sentiment analysis, archive assembly

📋 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.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: author, authors, canonicalUrl, description, hasPaywall, httpStatus, images, language, leadImage, markdown, modifiedAt, publishedAt, readingTimeMinutes, results, scrapedAt, section, siteName, subtitle, tags, title, url, wordCount. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

⚠️ 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.

🚀 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.

🔗 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.

⚠️ 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.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

For faster answers, join our Discord. It's the best place to get support and suggest new actors.