Apify Actors / Web pages as Markdown, text or HTML, with a browser fallback

Web pages as Markdown, text or HTML, with a browser fallback

Most pages come back fine from a plain HTTP request. Some answer with a bot check, an empty app shell or a 403, and a fetch tool that stops there leaves an agent guessing. This Actor tries a cheap HTTP request first, retries with Chrome-like headers, and opens headless Chromium only when a page is blocked, needs JavaScript or comes back empty.

You get one row per URL with the content as Markdown, plain text or cleaned HTML, plus the title, author, language and word count. Every row says which step produced the content, and every failed row carries an errorCode, so an agent can tell a dead link from a bot wall and move on. Failed rows cost nothing.

$0.001 per page with content · pay per result, no subscription

Price

What you get

• content as Markdown, plain text or cleaned HTML, with links and image paths made absolute.
• fetchedWith and attempts, which show the step that produced the content and how every step ended.
• title, author, publishedAt, language, wordCount and characters next to the content.
• errorCode and error on failed rows, such as BLOCKED_BY_SITE, JS_REQUIRED, TIMEOUT or UNSUPPORTED_CONTENT_TYPE, free of charge.

Input

Set the run options in the Apify console, or send the same object through the API.

{
  "urls": [
    "https://example.com/"
  ],
  "outputFormat": "markdown"
}

One URL as Markdown. urls takes 1 to 100 lines, and a line without a scheme gets https:// in front. fetchMode can be auto, http or browser, and every mode costs the same $0.001 per page with content.

Output

{
  "url": "https://example.com/",
  "status": "success",
  "errorCode": null,
  "error": null,
  "httpStatus": 200,
  "finalUrl": "https://example.com/",
  "fetchedWith": "http",
  "attempts": ["http: ok"],
  "contentType": "text/html; charset=utf-8",
  "format": "markdown",
  "extraction": "main-content",
  "title": "Example Domain",
  "description": null,
  "author": null,
  "publishedAt": null,
  "language": "en",
  "content": "This domain is for use in documentation examples without needing permission. This is not a service; avoid relying on it for testing and monitoring purposes.",
  "characters": 156,
  "wordCount": 25,
  "truncated": false,
  "elapsedMs": 1829,
  "fetchedAt": "2026-11-05T14:57:30.161Z"
}

One real row from a run on Apify on 2026-11-05. A page that needed all three steps lists them in order in attempts, for example ["http: HTTP 403 cloudflare", "http-browser-headers: HTTP 403 cloudflare", "browser: ok"], with fetchedWith: "browser".

Run it from your own code

The Actor takes the same input as a JSON body. This call starts a run, waits for it and returns the dataset items.

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/zovo-one~web-fetch-fallback/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://example.com/"], "outputFormat": "markdown"}'

A sync call waits at most 300 seconds. For longer runs, start a run with POST /v2/acts/zovo-one~web-fetch-fallback/runs, wait for it, then read /v2/datasets/<defaultDatasetId>/items.

Limits

100 URLs per run, 5 MB per page after decompression and 10 redirects per step. Requests go out directly from Apify's servers, with no proxy, and sites that block datacenter addresses end as BLOCKED_BY_SITE, free of charge. It doesn't log in, fill forms, solve captchas or scroll for lazy content. The browser waits up to 5 seconds for the network to go quiet and up to 8 seconds for a bot check to clear itself, within timeoutSecs. PDFs fail with UNSUPPORTED_CONTENT_TYPE and cost nothing. It doesn't read robots.txt, and it refuses localhost, private and reserved address ranges, cloud metadata hosts and URLs with embedded credentials.

Questions

Built and maintained by Zovo. Actor on Apify · All Actors.