What is crawl4ai-mcp?
crawl4ai-mcp is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that provides AI systems with access to the live web. Built on FastMCP v3 and Crawl4AI, it exposes 4 tools, 2 resources, and 3 prompts through a standardized MCP interface, backed by a lifespan-managed headless Chromium browser.
How to use crawl4ai-mcp?
Install via pip install mcp-crawl4ai or uv add mcp-crawl4ai, then run mcp-crawl4ai for stdio transport (default) or mcp-crawl4ai --transport http --port 8000 for HTTP. For Claude Desktop, add to MCP settings with the command mcp-crawl4ai and args ["--transport", "stdio"].
Key features of crawl4ai-mcp
- Full MCP compliance via FastMCP v3 with tool annotations
- 4 focused tools for scrape, crawl, session lifecycle, and artifacts
- 3 prompts for common LLM workflows (summarize, extract schema, compare)
- 2 resources exposing server configuration and version info
- Headless Chromium managed as a lifespan singleton
- Multiple transports: stdio (default) and Streamable HTTP
- LLM-optimized output in markdown, cleaned HTML, raw HTML, or plain text
- Auto browser setup and detection of missing Playwright browsers
Use cases of crawl4ai-mcp
- AI agents that need to scrape or crawl web pages for real-time information
- Summarizing a page with a specified focus using the
summarize_page prompt
- Building a CSS extraction schema for structured data from a URL
- Comparing two web pages and producing a structured comparison
- Deep traversal of a website using recursive BFS/DFS from a single seed
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