Markdown.New Crawl Local-First Access

Use markdown.new/crawl for multi-page crawling and async Markdown generation.

Required Behavior

1. Prefer local API calls with curl (or any suitable alternative tools).
2. Assume no authentication is required unless the service behavior changes.
3. Start with POST /crawl to get a job ID.
4. Poll GET /crawl/status/{jobId} until crawl completes.
5. Default to Markdown output; use ?format=json only when structured output is needed.
6. Keep crawl scope explicit (limit, depth, subdomain/external toggles, include/exclude patterns).
7. State default crawl behavior: same-domain links only, up to 500 pages per job.
8. If /crawl fails (network, timeout, blocked host), fall back to another method and state the fallback.

Core Commands

curl -X POST "https://markdown.new/crawl" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://docs.example.com","limit":50}'

curl "https://markdown.new/crawl/status/<jobId>"

curl "https://markdown.new/crawl/status/<jobId>?format=json"

curl "https://markdown.new/crawl/https://docs.example.com"

curl -X DELETE "https://markdown.new/crawl/status/<jobId>"

API Coverage

• POST /crawl: create async crawl job and return job ID.
• GET /crawl/status/{jobId}: return crawl output and status.
• DELETE /crawl/status/{jobId}: cancel a running crawl; completed pages remain available.
• GET /crawl/{url}: browser-style shortcut that starts crawl and returns tracking page.

Common Crawl Options

• url (required): crawl starting URL.
• limit: max pages, 1-500 (default 500).
• depth: max link depth, 1-10 (default 5).
• render: enable JS rendering for SPA pages.
• source: URL discovery strategy (all, sitemaps, links).
• maxAge: max cache age seconds (0-604800, default 86400).
• modifiedSince: UNIX timestamp; crawl pages modified after this time.
• includeExternalLinks: include cross-domain links.
• includeSubdomains: include subdomains.
• includePatterns / excludePatterns: wildcard URL filtering.

Output Notes

• GET /crawl/status/{jobId} returns concatenated Markdown by default.
• Add ?format=json for per-page structured records.
• Images are stripped by default; add ?retain_images=true to keep them.
• Results are retained for 14 days; expired job IDs return errors.

Operational Limits

• Rate model (as documented in the crawl page FAQ): each crawl costs 50 units against a 500 daily limit (about 10 crawls/day).
• Prefer lower limit values for targeted extraction to reduce cost and runtime.