orthogonal-sh/olostep

Olostep - Web Scraping & Crawling API

Powerful web scraping, crawling, and AI-powered content extraction.

Capabilities

• Create Scrape: Initiate a web page scrape
• Create Answer: The AI will perform actions like searching and browsing web pages to find the answer to the provided task
• Maps: This endpoint allows users to get all the urls on a certain website
• Start Crawl: Starts a new crawl
• Start Batch: Starts a new batch
• Batch Items: Retrieves the list of items processed for a batch
• Crawl Info: Fetches information about a specific crawl
• Crawl Pages: Fetches the list of pages for a specific crawl
• Get Answer: This endpoint retrieves a previously completed answer by its ID
• Get Scrape: Can be used to retrieve response for a scrape
• Batch Info: Retrieves the status and progress information about a batch
• Retrieve Content: Retrieve page content of processed batches and crawls urls

Usage

Create Scrape

Initiate a web page scrape

Parameters:

• url_to_scrape* (string) - The URL to start scraping from.
• wait_before_scraping (integer) - Time to wait in milliseconds before starting the scraping.
• formats (string[]) - Formats in which you want the content.
• remove_css_selectors (string) - Option to remove certain CSS selectors from the content. Optionally, you can also pass a JSON stringified array of specific selectors you want to remove. The CSS selectors removed when this option is set to default are ['nav','footer','script','style','noscript','svg',[role=alert],[role=banner],[role=dialog],[role=alertdialog],[role=region][aria-label*=skip i],[aria-modal=true]] Available options: default, none, array
• actions (object[]) - Actions to perform on the page before getting the content.
• country (string) - Residential country to load the request from. Supported values are: * US (United States) * CA (Canada) * IT (Italy) * IN (India) * GB (England) * JP (Japan) * MX (Mexico) * AU (Australia) * ID (Indonesia) * UA (UAE) * RU (Russia) * RANDOM Some operations, like scraping Google Search and Google News, support all countries.
• transformer (string) - Specify the HTML transformer to use, if any. Postlight's Mercury Parser library is used to remove ads and other unwanted content from the scraped content. Available options: postlight, none
• remove_images (boolean) - Option to remove images from the scraped content. Defaults to false.
• remove_class_names (string[]) - List of class names to remove from the content.
• parser (object) - When defining json as a format, you can use this parameter to specify the parser to use. Parsers are useful to extract structured content from web pages. Olostep has a few parsers built in for most common web pages, and you can also create your own parsers.
• llm_extract (object)
• links_on_page (object) - With this option, you can get all the links present on the page you scrape.
• screen_size (object) - Configuration for screen size. Preset dimensions are available through screen_type: desktop (1920x1080), mobile (414x896), or default (768x1024).
• metadata (object) - User-defined metadata. Not supported yet

orth api run olostep /v1/scrapes --body '{"url_to_scrape": "https://example.com/page"}'

Create Answer

The AI will perform actions like searching and browsing web pages to find the answer to the provided task. Execution time is 3-30s depending upon complexity. For longer tasks, use the agent endpoint instead.

Parameters:

• task* (string) - The task to be performed.
• json_format (object) - The desired output JSON object with empty values as a schema, or simply describe the data you want as a string.

orth api run olostep /v1/answers --body '{"task": "What are the latest AI developments?"}'

Maps

This endpoint allows users to get all the urls on a certain website. It can take up to 120 seconds for complex websites. For large websites, results are paginated using cursor-based pagination

Parameters:

• url* (string) - The URL of the website for which you want the links
• search_query (string) - An optional search query to sort the links by search relevance.
• top_n (number) - An optional number to limit to only top n links for a search query.
• include_subdomain (boolean) - Include subdomains of the given URL. true by default.
• include_urls (string[]) - URL path patterns to include using glob syntax. For example: /blog/** to only include blog URLs. Only URLs matching these patterns will be returned.
• exclude_urls (string[]) - URL path patterns to exclude using glob syntax. For example: /careers/**. Excluded URLs will supersede included URLs.
• cursor (string) - OPTIONAL: Pagination cursor from a previous response. When provided, returns the next set of URLs from where the previous request left off due to response size limit.

orth api run olostep /v1/maps --body '{"url": "https://example.com"}'

Start Crawl

Starts a new crawl. You receive a id to track the progress. The operation may take 1-10 mins depending upon the site and depth and pages parameters.

Parameters:

• start_url* (string) - The starting point of the crawl.
• max_pages* (number) - Maximum number of pages to crawl. Recommended for most use cases like crawling an entire website.
• include_urls (string[]) - URL path patterns to include in the crawl using glob syntax. Defaults to /** which includes all URLs. Use patterns like /blog/** to crawl specific sections (e.g., only blog pages), /products/*.html for product pages, or multiple patterns for different sections. Supports standard glob features like * (any characters) and ** (recursive matching).
• exclude_urls (string[]) - URL path names in glob pattern to exclude. For example: /careers/**. Excluded URLs will supersede included URLs.
• max_depth (number) - Maximum depth of the crawl. Useful to extract only up to n-degree of links.
• include_external (boolean) - Crawl first-degree external links.
• include_subdomain (boolean) - Include subdomains of the website. false by default.
• search_query (string) - An optional search query to find specific links and also sort the results by relevance.
• top_n (number) - An optional number to only crawl the top N most relevant links on every page as per search query.
• webhook_url (string) - An optional POST request endpoint called when this crawl is completed. The body of the request will be same as the response of this v1/crawls/{crawl_id} endpoint.
• timeout (number) - End the crawl after n seconds with the pages completed until then. May take ~10s extra from provided timeout.

orth api run olostep /v1/crawls --body '{
  "start_url": "https://example.com",
  "max_pages": 100
}'

Start Batch

Starts a new batch. You receive an id that you can use to track the progress of the batch as shown here. Note: Processing time is constant regardless of batch size

Parameters:

• items* (object[]) - Array of items to be processed in the batch.
• country (string) - Country for the batch execution. Provide in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes like US(USA), IN(India), etc
• parser (object) - You can use this parameter to specify the parser to use. Parsers are useful to extract structured content from web pages. Olostep has a few parsers built in for most common web pages, and you can also create your own parsers.
• links_on_page (object) - Get all the links present on each page in the batch.

orth api run olostep /v1/batches --body '{
  "items": [
    {"url_to_scrape": "https://example.com/page1"},
    {"url_to_scrape": "https://example.com/page2"}
  ]
}'

Batch Items

Retrieves the list of items processed for a batch. You can then use the retrieve_id to get the content with the Retrieve Endpoint

orth api run olostep /v1/batches/{batch_id}/items

Crawl Info

Fetches information about a specific crawl.

orth api run olostep /v1/crawls/{crawl_id}

Crawl Pages

Fetches the list of pages for a specific crawl.

orth api run olostep /v1/crawls/{crawl_id}/pages

Get Answer

This endpoint retrieves a previously completed answer by its ID.

orth api run olostep /v1/answers/{answer_id}

Get Scrape

Can be used to retrieve response for a scrape.

orth api run olostep /v1/scrapes/{scrape_id}

Batch Info

Retrieves the status and progress information about a batch. To retrieve the content for a batch, see here

orth api run olostep /v1/batches/{batch_id}

Retrieve Content

Retrieve page content of processed batches and crawls urls.

Parameters:

• retrieve_id* (string) - The ID of the page content to retrieve. Available in the response of /v1/crawls/{crawl_id}/pages, /v1/scrapes/{scrape_id} or /v1/batches/{batch_id}/items endpoints
• formats (string[]) - Optional array to retrieve only specific formats in production. If not provided, all formats will be returned.

orth api run olostep /v1/retrieve --body '{"retrieve_id": "abc123"}'

Use Cases

1. Data Collection: Gather data from websites at scale
2. Content Monitoring: Track changes on competitor sites
3. Research Automation: Get AI-synthesized answers from web sources
4. SEO Analysis: Crawl and analyze site structure

Discover More

For full endpoint details and parameters:

orth api show olostep              # List all endpoints
orth api show olostep /v1/scrapes   # Get endpoint details