Spider API Overview

What the API Does

Spider’s API turns any URL into structured data. You send a URL and configuration, and get back page content in the format you need: HTML, markdown, plain text, or structured JSON. The API handles proxy rotation, JavaScript rendering, rate limiting, and anti-bot detection on your behalf.

Core Capabilities

• Proxy rotation: Datacenter, residential, and mobile proxies with automatic failover
• Full concurrency: Crawl thousands of pages per minute using the Rust-based engine
• Smart mode: Automatically picks HTTP or Chrome rendering based on each page’s needs
• Caching: Repeated crawls of the same pages return faster
• Output formats: Markdown, HTML, plain text, or raw bytes
• AI extraction: Pull structured fields from pages using built-in LLM integration
• Anti-bot measures: Browser fingerprinting and proxy rotation to reduce blocks

See the full API reference for every endpoint and parameter.

Endpoints

Quick Start

import requests, os

headers = {
    'Authorization': f'Bearer {os.getenv("SPIDER_API_KEY")}',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
}

# Crawl a site and get markdown
response = requests.post('https://api.spider.cloud/crawl',
  headers=headers,
  json={
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "limit": 10,
    "return_format": "markdown",
    "request": "smart"
  }
)

for page in response.json():
    print(f"{page['url']} — {len(page['content'])} chars")

Request Modes

The request parameter controls how Spider fetches each page:

Output Formats

Set return_format to control what you get back:

For AI workflows, markdown strips navigation, ads, and boilerplate, giving you just the page content.

Streaming Large Crawls

For crawls over a few dozen pages, use streaming to process results as they arrive:

import requests, json, os

headers = {
    'Authorization': f'Bearer {os.getenv("SPIDER_API_KEY")}',
    'Content-Type': 'application/jsonl',
}

response = requests.post('https://api.spider.cloud/crawl',
  headers=headers,
  json={
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "limit": 250,
    "return_format": "markdown"
  },
  stream=True
)

for line in response.iter_lines(decode_unicode=True):
    if line:
        page = json.loads(line)
        print(f"Crawled: {page['url']} ({page['status']})")

Set Content-Type to application/jsonl and enable stream=True in your HTTP client. See the streaming docs for more details.

SDK Libraries

Official SDKs handle authentication and provide typed methods for all endpoints:

• Python SDK: pip install spider_client
• JavaScript SDK: npm install @spider-cloud/spider-client
• Rust SDK: cargo add spider-client

Spider also integrates with LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, and other AI frameworks as a document loader.

Getting Set Up

1. Register or sign in.
2. Purchase credits. Pay-as-you-go at $1 per 10,000 credits.
3. Create an API key.
4. Start making requests.

Track your usage on the usage page.