# 🚀🤖 Crawl4AI: Open-Source LLM-Friendly Web Crawler & Scraper
Crawl4AI is the #1 trending GitHub repository, actively maintained by a vibrant community. It delivers blazing-fast, AI-ready web crawling tailored for large language models, AI agents, and data pipelines. Fully open source, flexible, and built for real-time performance, **Crawl4AI** empowers developers with unmatched speed, precision, and deployment ease.
> **Note**: If you're looking for the old documentation, you can access it [here](https://old.docs.crawl4ai.com).
## Quick Start
Here's a quick example to show you how easy it is to use Crawl4AI with its asynchronous capabilities:
```python
import asyncio
from crawl4ai import AsyncWebCrawler
async def main():
# Create an instance of AsyncWebCrawler
async with AsyncWebCrawler() as crawler:
# Run the crawler on a URL
result = await crawler.arun(url="https://crawl4ai.com")
# Print the extracted content
print(result.markdown)
# Run the async main function
asyncio.run(main())
```
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## Video Tutorial
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## What Does Crawl4AI Do?
Crawl4AI is a feature-rich crawler and scraper that aims to:
1. **Generate Clean Markdown**: Perfect for RAG pipelines or direct ingestion into LLMs.
2. **Structured Extraction**: Parse repeated patterns with CSS, XPath, or LLM-based extraction.
3. **Advanced Browser Control**: Hooks, proxies, stealth modes, session re-use—fine-grained control.
4. **High Performance**: Parallel crawling, chunk-based extraction, real-time use cases.
5. **Open Source**: No forced API keys, no paywalls—everyone can access their data.
**Core Philosophies**:
- **Democratize Data**: Free to use, transparent, and highly configurable.
- **LLM Friendly**: Minimally processed, well-structured text, images, and metadata, so AI models can easily consume it.
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## Documentation Structure
To help you get started, we’ve organized our docs into clear sections:
- **Setup & Installation**
Basic instructions to install Crawl4AI via pip or Docker.
- **Quick Start**
A hands-on introduction showing how to do your first crawl, generate Markdown, and do a simple extraction.
- **Core**
Deeper guides on single-page crawling, advanced browser/crawler parameters, content filtering, and caching.
- **Advanced**
Explore link & media handling, lazy loading, hooking & authentication, proxies, session management, and more.
- **Extraction**
Detailed references for no-LLM (CSS, XPath) vs. LLM-based strategies, chunking, and clustering approaches.
- **API Reference**
Find the technical specifics of each class and method, including `AsyncWebCrawler`, `arun()`, and `CrawlResult`.
Throughout these sections, you’ll find code samples you can **copy-paste** into your environment. If something is missing or unclear, raise an issue or PR.
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## How You Can Support
- **Star & Fork**: If you find Crawl4AI helpful, star the repo on GitHub or fork it to add your own features.
- **File Issues**: Encounter a bug or missing feature? Let us know by filing an issue, so we can improve.
- **Pull Requests**: Whether it’s a small fix, a big feature, or better docs—contributions are always welcome.
- **Join Discord**: Come chat about web scraping, crawling tips, or AI workflows with the community.
- **Spread the Word**: Mention Crawl4AI in your blog posts, talks, or on social media.
**Our mission**: to empower everyone—students, researchers, entrepreneurs, data scientists—to access, parse, and shape the world’s data with speed, cost-efficiency, and creative freedom.
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## Quick Links
- **[GitHub Repo](https://github.com/unclecode/crawl4ai)**
- **[Installation Guide](./core/installation.md)**
- **[Quick Start](./core/quickstart.md)**
- **[API Reference](./api/async-webcrawler.md)**
- **[Changelog](https://github.com/unclecode/crawl4ai/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md)**
Thank you for joining me on this journey. Let’s keep building an **open, democratic** approach to data extraction and AI together.
Happy Crawling!
— *Unclecode, Founder & Maintainer of Crawl4AI*