Best web scraping APIs for AI in 2026

The main text, without the menus

A model pays for every token it reads. The Extract API returns a page's main text without its menus, footers and ads, as markdown with headings, lists and links kept, or as plain text. It reads web pages and documents: PDF, Word and Excel.

On WCXB, which scores how well an extractor keeps a page's main text and drops the rest, the Extract API scores highest, at 0.908 F1 on the 511 page test set. The score and its method are on the benchmarks page.

One price, whatever the page needs

Firecrawl's Hobby plan reads 5,000 pages a month for $19, and unused credits do not roll over. Crawl4AI's cloud charges 0.1 to 2 credits a page and AlterLab $0.0002 to $0.02, by what the site needs. Spider bills gigabytes and CPU minutes, and Jina Reader bills tokens by the length of the page.

SpecStream bills $0.0008 for each page that gives text. 1,000 pages cost $0.80 whatever they hold, and the reply carries the price of the call in price_usd.

Blocked pages are tried again, and never billed

The Extract API tries a page that refuses a plain read again as a browser would ask, then in a real browser, then from the site's own feed, then from its newest public archive capture. Each result says where it was read: read_from is live, site or archive, with captured_at for an archive copy.

A site that still refuses, or answers with a bot check, comes back as blocked and is not charged. A bot check's page is never returned as text, so a challenge page never lands in your data as content. A 404 and a page with no text are not charged either.

Your client stays

SpecStream answers four of these APIs at their own paths, in their own reply form: Firecrawl, Spider, Jina Reader and the Crawl4AI server. The address changes, and the key. Each page is one Extract API page at $0.0008.

Test it on your own URLs

Every list of the best APIs tests the sites its author chose. The test that counts runs your own URLs. This script sends the same Firecrawl call to Firecrawl and to SpecStream, and prints how many pages came back as markdown and how many characters each sent your model.

import os

import requests

urls = [line.strip() for line in open("urls.txt") if line.strip()]
hosts = {
    "Firecrawl": ("https://api.firecrawl.dev", os.environ["FIRECRAWL_API_KEY"]),
    "SpecStream": ("https://api.specstream.ai/firecrawl", os.environ["SPECSTREAM_API_KEY"]),
}

for name, (base, key) in hosts.items():
    pages = chars = 0
    for url in urls:
        reply = requests.post(
            f"{base}/v2/scrape",
            headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {key}"},
            json={"url": url},
            timeout=120,
        )
        markdown = reply.json().get("data", {}).get("markdown") if reply.ok else None
        pages += bool(markdown)
        chars += len(markdown or "")
    print(f"{name}: {pages} of {len(urls)} pages as markdown, {chars:,} characters for your model to read")

Run it with the URLs your agent reads. Fewer characters for the same page means fewer tokens in your prompt, as long as the main text is there.

Search and rows on the same key

The same key runs the Search API, the most accurate web search API in the world: 97.9 F-score on all 1,000 SimpleQA Verified questions and 64.0 item F1 on all 200 WideSearch tasks. An agent gets search_web and read_pages over MCP. When it needs records, not pages, Deep Search returns structured rows that meet every condition it sent, at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a delivered row.

Context.dev

Developer is $20 a month for 10,000 pages, with overage at $3.00 per 1,000 credits, and JSON extraction against your schema takes 5 credits a page. The free tier scrapes 1,000 pages a month. SpecStream reads any page at $0.80 per 1,000 with no plan.

ScrapingBee

Hobby is $19 a month for 75,000 credits, valid for one month, and a call takes 1 to 75 credits. SpecStream answers its HTML API at https://api.specstream.ai/scrapingbee/api/v1 for $0.80 per 1,000 pages.

Scrapfly

Discovery is $30 a month for 200,000 credits. SpecStream answers Scrapfly's /scrape at https://api.specstream.ai/scrapfly/scrape (Scrapfly guide).