Extract Web Content for LLMs: SnapAPI's New Extract API

Published February 2, 2026 · 5 min read

Building an AI application that needs web content? Whether you're creating a RAG pipeline, building an AI research agent, or just need clean text from websites, our new Extract API makes it trivially easy.

Why We Built This

We kept hearing from developers building LLM-powered applications:

• "I just need the article text, not all the navigation and ads"
• "Converting HTML to markdown is harder than it should be"
• "I want structured data for my RAG pipeline"
• "Cookie banners are ruining my extractions"

So we built the Extract API to solve all of these problems with a single endpoint.

Extraction Types

1. Markdown Extraction

Get clean, well-formatted markdown from any webpage. Perfect for feeding into LLMs:

curl -X POST https://api.snapapi.pics/v1/extract \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com/article",
    "type": "markdown"
  }'

Returns properly formatted markdown with:

• Headings preserved (H1-H6)
• Links converted to markdown format
• Code blocks with language hints
• Tables converted to markdown tables
• Lists (ordered and unordered)

2. Article Extraction

Uses Mozilla's Readability (the same engine behind Firefox Reader View) to extract just the article content:

// Response for type: "article"
{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "title": "Article Title",
    "byline": "John Doe",
    "siteName": "Example Blog",
    "excerpt": "First paragraph...",
    "length": 1250,
    "markdown": "# Article Title\n\nFull content in markdown..."
  }
}

3. Structured Data

Get everything you need for indexing or analysis in one response:

// Response for type: "structured"
{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "url": "https://example.com/article",
    "title": "Article Title",
    "author": "John Doe",
    "publishedTime": "2026-01-15T10:00:00Z",
    "description": "Meta description...",
    "image": "https://example.com/og-image.png",
    "wordCount": 1250,
    "content": "Full content in markdown..."
  }
}

Use Cases

RAG Pipelines

Building a retrieval-augmented generation system? Extract clean content, chunk it, and feed it to your vector database:

const { data } = await fetch('https://api.snapapi.pics/v1/extract', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: { 'X-API-Key': 'YOUR_KEY', 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
  body: JSON.stringify({ url: articleUrl, type: 'markdown', maxLength: 100000 })
}).then(r => r.json());

// Now chunk and embed
const chunks = splitIntoChunks(data.data, 1000);
await vectorDB.upsert(chunks.map(c => ({ text: c, embedding: embed(c) })));

AI Research Agents

Building an agent that browses the web? Get structured summaries instantly:

const result = await extract(url, 'structured');
const prompt = `Summarize this article:
Title: ${result.title}
Author: ${result.author}
Content: ${result.content.slice(0, 8000)}`;

const summary = await llm.complete(prompt);

Content Analysis

Need to analyze multiple articles? Extract metadata efficiently:

const { data } = await extract(url, 'metadata');
// Returns: title, description, OG tags, Twitter cards, canonical URL, favicon...

Cookie Blocking Included

GDPR consent banners won't pollute your extractions. Just add blockCookieBanners: true:

{
  "url": "https://european-news-site.com/article",
  "type": "markdown",
  "blockCookieBanners": true
}

We use the same advanced blocking engine that powers our screenshot service.

Pricing

Extractions count as 0.5 screenshots against your quota, making it very cost-effective for high-volume use cases. On the Pro plan ($29/month), you get 50,000 screenshots or ~100,000 extractions.

Get Started

The Extract API is available on all plans, including our free tier. Sign up now to get your API key and start extracting content in minutes.

• Full API Documentation
• Try it in the Playground