Quick Start: Make Your First AdsCrawl API Request Today

AdsCrawl is designed to be usable from your first request. This guide walks you from account creation to a working API call — no configuration files, no infrastructure setup, and no proxy accounts to manage separately. By the end, you’ll have a rendered page response in your terminal and a clear path to whichever API fits your use case.

Create a free account

Go to app.adscrawl.net/register and sign up. The Free plan gives you 500 credits with no credit card required — enough to explore HTML extraction, screenshots, and short CDP sessions.

Copy your API key

After signing in, open the AdsCrawl dashboard and copy your API key. Store it as an environment variable on your server or in a secret manager.

export ADSCRAWL_API_KEY="your-api-key"

Never paste your API key into client-side JavaScript, commit it to source control, or include it in a public URL. Keep it on your server only.

Make your first request

Use POST /html to fetch a rendered page. This endpoint is synchronous — AdsCrawl launches a real browser, loads the URL, and streams the result back in the HTTP response.Set contentMode to control what you get back:

"html" — full rendered page HTML (default)
"markdown" — clean, readable Markdown extracted by the Readability parser
"json" — structured article object with title, byline, excerpt, and body

export ADSCRAWL_API_KEY="your-api-key"

curl --fail-with-body -sS -X POST "https://api.adscrawl.net/html" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -H "x-api-key: $ADSCRAWL_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com/article",
    "contentMode": "markdown",
    "waitUntil": "domcontentloaded"
  }'

const response = await fetch("https://api.adscrawl.net/html", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    "content-type": "application/json",
    "x-api-key": process.env.ADSCRAWL_API_KEY,
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    url: "https://example.com/article",
    contentMode: "markdown",
    waitUntil: "domcontentloaded",
  }),
});

const markdown = await response.text();
console.log(markdown);

import os
import requests

response = requests.post(
    "https://api.adscrawl.net/html",
    headers={
        "content-type": "application/json",
        "x-api-key": os.environ["ADSCRAWL_API_KEY"],
    },
    json={
        "url": "https://example.com/article",
        "contentMode": "markdown",
        "waitUntil": "domcontentloaded",
    },
)

print(response.text)

Use "waitUntil": "domcontentloaded" for most HTML and Markdown extraction — it’s faster and avoids waiting on analytics or lazy-loaded resources. Switch to "load" or "networkidle" when the content you need depends on secondary resources or deferred JavaScript.

Check the response

A successful request returns HTTP 200. The response body depends on contentMode:

markdown (text/markdown)
json (application/json)
html (text/html)

# Example Article

Readable body content extracted from the page.

- Key point one
- Key point two

{
  "title": "Example Article",
  "byline": "Jane Smith",
  "excerpt": "A concise summary of the article.",
  "siteName": "Example",
  "lang": "en",
  "dir": null,
  "content": "<div><p>Readable body...</p></div>",
  "textContent": "Readable body...",
  "length": 2487,
  "publishedTime": null
}

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head><title>Example Article</title></head>
  <body>
    <!-- Full rendered page HTML -->
  </body>
</html>

If you receive a 402, your account is out of credits — check your balance in the dashboard. A 401 means the API key is missing or incorrect.

What to explore next

AdsCrawl has five APIs. Start with the one that fits your workflow:

Browser Tasks

HTML, Markdown, JSON, screenshots, and structured field extraction from SPAs.

Remote CDP

Connect Playwright or Puppeteer to a remote browser for scripted automation.

Cloud Browsers

Persistent browser profiles with a live viewer, saved cookies, and reusable state.

API Reference

Complete request and response schemas for every endpoint.

If you’d prefer to let your coding agent handle setup, paste this prompt into your agent:

Set up AdsCrawl in this codebase. Use https://api.adscrawl.net/auth.md to help me
create an account and authorize an API key, then follow
https://api.adscrawl.net/docs/agent-quickstart.md to complete the integration.

The agent will walk you through sign-up and integration. You approve the API key request in your browser.

Once you’ve made your first successful request, read the Authentication page to understand the full credential model — especially if you plan to use Cloud Browsers or CDP sessions.

Get Started

Core Concepts

Guides

Pricing & Limits

Quick Start: Make Your First AdsCrawl API Request Today

What to explore next

Browser Tasks

Remote CDP

Cloud Browsers

API Reference

​What to explore next

Browser Tasks

Remote CDP

Cloud Browsers

API Reference

What to explore next