Web Crawling

Use this skill for general multi-page crawling when the user wants more than a one-page fetch but does not yet need a highly specialised workflow.

First choose the right crawl path

Prefer crawl4ai when:

• the user wants markdown from many pages
• the output is for AI/RAG ingestion
• documentation export is the main goal
• you want a bounded deep crawl with good markdown output

Prefer katana when:

• the main need is URL discovery or site mapping
• you want to enumerate a site's surface before extraction
• you need JS-aware endpoint discovery

Prefer scrapegraph-ai when:

• the main need is structured extraction rather than broad crawling
• you only need a small set of pages turned into JSON-like facts

Use this web-crawling skill directly when:

• you need a bounded general crawl
• a simple recursive content pass is enough
• you are combining native fetches, small scripts, and selective link following

Default operating pattern

1. Start from the seed URL.
2. Use the agent's native web fetch / simple HTTP path first for cooperative pages.
3. Extract internal links and keep scope bounded.
4. Save output to a file, not the chat transcript.
5. Increase depth only after the first pass looks good.

Escalation contract

When the crawl path hits blocking or rendering problems:

1. Try the native path first

• native web_fetch
• requests/BeautifulSoup
• or the chosen crawl tool directly

1. Escalate to camofox if the problem is:

• Cloudflare / anti-bot challenge
• blank or JS-only page content
• CAPTCHA / verify-you-are-human flow
• a browser-rendering dependency that breaks the crawl

1. Escalate to residential-proxy only if all of these are true:

• camofox was actually tried and still failed, or the blocked target is a narrow public HTTP endpoint where a browser step is not sufficient
• the blocked URLs are high-value
• the user explicitly approves paid proxy use
• the proxy scope stays narrow and targeted

Do not automatically turn a whole crawl into a proxy-backed crawl.

Guardrails

• Respect robots.txt and site terms where relevant.
• Keep depth and page count bounded.
• Prefer discovery first, then extraction, instead of blind breadth.
• If only a few pages matter, recover only those pages.
• If the task grows into docs ingestion, switch to crawl4ai.
• If the task grows into route discovery, switch to katana.

Output format

Save crawled content in a file with clear source markers, for example:

markdown
# Website Crawl - example.com

**Seed URL:** https://example.com
**Depth:** 2
**Crawl Date:** YYYY-MM-DD

---

## Page: https://example.com/page1
**Depth:** 0

[content]

---

## Page: https://example.com/page2
**Depth:** 1

[content]

Reporting

markdown
## Web crawl result
- Seed URL: ...
- Depth / page cap: ...
- Primary method: native fetch | crawl4ai | katana | custom script
- Escalated to camofox: yes/no
- Escalated to residential proxy: yes/no
- Output file: ...
- Notes: ...

Optional local integrations

This public extraction keeps optional Browserless reference material and example scripts for cases where a local or paid browser-automation escalation path is useful. Those extras are optional and require your own BROWSERLESSIO_API_KEY if you choose to use them. They are not required for the core skill.