Detailed Introduction
Crawl4AI is an open-source, LLM-friendly web crawler and scraper designed to turn web content into clean, indexable Markdown and structured data for RAG and downstream AI workflows. It supports Playwright-driven browser crawling, remote browser control, session and proxy management, and provides Dockerized deployments and an API gateway for production usage.
Main Features
- LLM-ready Markdown generation with noise removal and citation formatting.
- Flexible extraction strategies: CSS/XPath, schema-based extraction, BM25 filtering, and intelligent table chunking.
- Browser and session management with Playwright, persistent profiles, and proxy support to reduce bot detection.
- Production readiness with Docker images, FastAPI server, and a web playground for interactive testing.
Use Cases
- Building RAG pipelines: prepare clean corpora for vector indexing and retrieval.
- Automated monitoring and reporting: scheduled crawls for news, competitors, and industry sites.
- Research and data engineering: large-scale table extraction, semantic chunking, and LLM-driven data cleaning experiments.
Technical Features
- Asynchronous crawler with a managed browser pool for performance and stability; supports virtual scroll and lazy-loaded content.
- LLM-driven structured extraction and smart chunking with extensible hooks and custom strategies.
- Apache-2.0 licensed, active community, and comprehensive documentation and examples for quick onboarding.