tavily-crawl

by tavily-ai

Multi-page website crawler with semantic filtering and markdown export. Crawl entire site sections with depth and breadth control; filter by path regex, domain, or natural language instructions to focus results Save each page as local markdown files via --output-dir , or return structured JSON for agentic processing Use semantic instructions with chunk extraction to prevent context bloat when feeding results to LLMs; use full-page extraction for offline documentation downloads Supports... npx skills add https://github.com/tavily-ai/skills --skill tavily-crawl Download ZIPGitHub399

tavily crawl

Crawl a website and extract content from multiple pages. Supports saving each page as a local markdown file.

When to use

• You need content from many pages on a site (e.g., all /docs/)

• You want to download documentation for offline use

• Step 4 in the workflow: search → extract → map → crawl → research

Options

Option Description --max-depth Levels deep (1-5, default: 1) --max-breadth Links per page (default: 20) --limit Total pages cap (default: 50) --instructions Natural language guidance for semantic focus --chunks-per-source Chunks per page (1-5, requires --instructions) --extract-depth basic (default) or advanced --format markdown (default) or text --select-paths Comma-separated regex patterns to include --exclude-paths Comma-separated regex patterns to exclude --select-domains Comma-separated regex for domains to include --exclude-domains Comma-separated regex for domains to exclude --allow-external / --no-external Include external links (default: allow) --include-images Include images --timeout Max wait (10-150 seconds) -o, --output Save JSON output to file --output-dir Save each page as a .md file in directory --json Structured JSON output

Crawl for context vs. data collection

For agentic use (feeding results to an LLM):

Always use --instructions + --chunks-per-source. Returns only relevant chunks instead of full pages — prevents context explosion.

tvly crawl "https://docs.example.com" --instructions "API authentication" --chunks-per-source 3 --json

For data collection (saving to files):

Use --output-dir without --chunks-per-source to get full pages as markdown files.

tvly crawl "https://docs.example.com" --max-depth 2 --output-dir ./docs/

Tips

• Start conservative — --max-depth 1, --limit 20 — and scale up.

• Use --select-paths to focus on the section you need.

• Use map first to understand site structure before a full crawl.

• Always set --limit to prevent runaway crawls.

See also

• tavily-map — discover URLs before deciding to crawl

• tavily-extract — extract individual pages

• tavily-search — find pages when you don't have a URL