AnyCrawl: Turn Websites into LLM-Ready Data with This Open-Source Crawler

If you've ever needed to scrape websites for AI training data or extract structured search results at scale, you know the pain: rate limits, CAPTCHAs, and messy HTML. AnyCrawl is a Node.js/TypeScript crawler that solves these problems while keeping things fast and scalable.

With built-in multi-threading, search engine result parsing (Google/Bing/Baidu), and LLM-optimized output, it’s a solid tool for developers building data pipelines or AI applications.

What It Does

AnyCrawl is an open-source crawler API that:

• Extracts clean text from websites, optimized for LLM consumption
• Parses structured SERP data from Google, Bing, and Baidu
• Runs multi-threaded bulk jobs for high-throughput scraping
• Handles proxies, retries, and rate-limiting automatically

It’s built on Node.js/TypeScript, so it fits neatly into modern JS/TS workflows.

Why It’s Cool

1. No More Regex Hell – Instead of wrestling with HTML, you get structured data (JSON) out of the box.
2. Search Engine Friendly – Need SERP data? It normalizes results from multiple engines into a consistent format.
3. Built for Scale – Native multi-threading means you can process hundreds of URLs efficiently.
4. LLM-Ready Output – Strips ads, boilerplate, and noise, leaving clean text for training or analysis.

How to Try It

1. Clone the repo:

   git clone https://github.com/any4ai/AnyCrawl.git
   

2. Install dependencies (PNPM preferred):

   pnpm install
   

3. Configure your targets in ai.config.example.json and run:

   pnpm start
   

For a hosted version, check out anycrawl.dev.

Final Thoughts

AnyCrawl is a no-nonsense tool for developers who need real-world web data without the usual headaches. Whether you’re feeding an LLM, monitoring SEO, or building a dataset, it’s worth a look. The MIT license means you can use it freely, and the active development (1.1k stars and counting) suggests it’s only getting better.

Got a use case for it? Drop us a tweet @githubprojects.