What is CrawlForge MCP Server?
CrawlForge MCP Server is a Model Context Protocol server that gives AI assistants 28 web tools — scraping, crawling, web search, real Google SERP rank tracking, multi-source deep research, an autonomous agent, document processing and stealth browsing — through a single stdio or Streamable HTTP connection.
It is built for developers and agent builders who want live web data in a shape a model can actually use: clean Markdown, schema-validated JSON, links, metadata and screenshots from one fetch, rather than raw HTML a model has to guess its way through. Every tool is MCP-native and metered by credits, so cost is predictable per call. The server is MIT-licensed, runs on Node.js 18+, and works in Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, n8n and any other MCP client.
Unlike most hosted scraping APIs, LLM-powered extraction defaults to a local Ollama model — no LLM provider key, no per-token cost, and page content never leaves your machine. OpenAI and Anthropic are opt-in.
How to use CrawlForge MCP Server?
Get a free API key at crawlforge.dev/signup — 1,000 credits, no credit card. Then run the one-step installer, which stores your key and registers the server with every MCP client it detects:
npx crawlforge init
Or configure a client by hand with the Config block above (CRAWLFORGE_API_KEY is the only required environment variable). For n8n or any HTTP-transport client, run the server in Streamable HTTP mode:
export CRAWLFORGE_API_KEY=cf_live_your_api_key_here
npx -p crawlforge-mcp-server crawlforge-mcp --http # Streamable HTTP endpoint on :10000/mcp
Then just ask in natural language — "research the top 5 competitors in this space and cite sources", "crawl these docs and summarize them", "pull the price and rating from this Amazon listing", "tell me when this pricing page changes" — and the client picks the right tool.
Optional environment variables: OLLAMA_BASE_URL / OLLAMA_DEFAULT_MODEL to steer local LLM extraction, OPENAI_API_KEY or ANTHROPIC_API_KEY for cloud extraction, DATAFORSEO_LOGIN / DATAFORSEO_PASSWORD to enable serp_rank, and CRAWLFORGE_TOOLS / CRAWLFORGE_TOOL_GROUPS to expose only a subset of tools to a given client.
Key features of CrawlForge MCP Server
- 28 MCP-native tools covering the whole pipeline — discover, fetch, extract, analyze, research, monitor — so you rarely need a second server.
- One fetch, many formats — the unified
scrape tool takes a formats array (markdown, html, rawHtml, text, links, metadata, screenshot, JSON-schema) and serves every requested format from a single request, with per-format partial-success warnings.
- Local-LLM extraction by default —
extract_with_llm and extract_structured run against local Ollama out of the box: $0 per token, and your page content stays on your machine. Cloud providers are opt-in per call.
- Autonomous
agent — describe the outcome in plain English with no URLs; it plans, searches, navigates and shapes an answer under orchestrator-enforced hard stops (max steps, max URLs, wall-clock), never limits the LLM can talk itself out of.
deep_research with stealth recovery — multi-stage research that automatically retries sources returning 403 through a real fingerprinted browser (Camoufox) and re-extracts from the rendered HTML.
- Real Google organic rank —
serp_rank returns the actual SERP position for a keyword and domain, the number a search API cannot give you. It costs 0 credits until you configure DataForSEO.
- 11 pre-built site templates —
scrape_template returns structured data from Amazon, Shopify, LinkedIn, GitHub, YouTube, X/Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt, Stack Overflow and npm without writing a single selector.
- Change monitoring —
track_changes baselines a page and reports a change percentage plus a diff on every later check, with CSS-selector scoping and webhooks.
- Current MCP spec (2025-06-18) — schema-validated
structuredContent on the tools that return records, self-correctable input errors the model can retry from, deterministic tools/list ordering for prompt-cache friendliness, elicitation before expensive runs, and experimental async tasks on the four long-running tools.
- Security-hardened — SSRF validation on every URL and every redirect hop (loopback, RFC1918, IPv6 link-local, cloud metadata endpoints and dangerous ports all blocked), a fail-closed backend allow-list, a 7-action allowlist for browser automation with JavaScript execution off by default, and per-tool credit gating.
- Polite by default — requests identify honestly as
CrawlForge/<version>, respect robots.txt, and are cryptographically signed with Web Bot Auth (RFC 9421) so sites can verify who is crawling them.
- Credits that don't expire — the 1,000-credit free grant and paid-plan credits both roll over; nothing is lost at month end.
Use cases of CrawlForge MCP Server
- Competitive and market research —
deep_research or agent gathers, dedupes and synthesizes across many sources with citations, from a single natural-language prompt.
- Feeding documentation to a coding assistant —
map_site discovers the URL inventory, crawl_deep walks it, and generate_llms_txt produces an llms.txt for the site.
- Price and inventory extraction —
scrape_template for known marketplaces, extract_structured with your own JSON schema for everything else.
- Competitor and compliance monitoring —
track_changes watches pricing pages, terms, or regulatory notices and fires a webhook when a page meaningfully changes.
- Bulk collection —
batch_scrape processes many URLs in one job (async with a webhook for large batches), paginated back through get_batch_results.
- Reaching pages that block scrapers —
stealth_mode and scrape_with_actions handle Cloudflare/DataDome challenges, logins, and click-and-wait flows; localization emulates a country and language for geo-specific pricing.
- SEO and content workflows —
search_web for ranked results, serp_rank for true organic position, analyze_content and summarize_content for sentiment, entities, keywords and summaries.
- Document pipelines —
process_document parses PDFs, Word files and other formats into text a model can reason over.
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