Olostep

Olostep is positioned as web data infrastructure for AI, focusing on completing search, scraping, crawling, structuring, and monitoring with "one API." Its official website says it is built specifically for knowledge-work AI and is "the best agent search, scraping, and crawling API."

In terms of use, Olostep mainly serves AI agents, research, data enrichment, RAG, and real-time data workflows. It can connect web data to AI applications, agents, and data pipelines, and also supports automating complex data pipelines through the /agents endpoint with natural language prompts, and can pass in your own internal knowledge as context.

Main capabilities include:

1. Scraping (/scrapes): Convert any URL into LLM-ready Markdown, HTML, screenshots, PDF, or structured JSON, and handle JS-rendered pages, actions, and extraction workflows without maintaining your own browsers, proxies, or fragile scrapers.
2. Crawling (/crawls): Crawl websites at scale, collect subpage content, control depth and URL patterns, and return clean HTML or Markdown for indexing, data enrichment, RAG, and AI workflows.
3. Sitemaps (/maps): Discover all URLs on a website through sitemaps and page links, support filtering by path patterns, pagination, and generate clean URL lists for SEO, crawling, and batch processing.
4. Batch processing (/batches): Process up to 10k concurrent URLs in a single batch, return clean web data and aggregated content in 5-8 minutes, and run multiple batches in parallel to scale to millions of concurrent requests.
5. Search (/searches): Search the web in natural language and return relevant links, titles, and descriptions, with semantic search support.
6. Answers (/answers): Search the web in natural language and get AI-generated answers, with support for returning verified results and sources in the required JSON format.
7. Monitoring (/monitors): Create scheduled web monitors in natural language, track changes on a single page or across the web, detect deltas, extract structured insights, and receive change notifications via email, webhook, or SMS.

In terms of usage, the official website says it is built for developers: it provides an object-oriented API, native Python and NodeJS SDK clients, metadata support, webhook events, and is easy to try and extend. It also provides a CLI, available via npx -y olostep-cli@latest --help Execute map, scrape, crawl, batch processing, and answer generation directly in the terminal, outputting clean JSON, making it easy to use in scripts, CI pipelines, and AI agents. It also supports adding Olostep to MCP clients compatible with the Model Context Protocol, with an example registration configuration of {"mcpServers":{"olostep-web":{"command":"npx","args":["-y","olostep-mcp"],"env":{"OLOSTEP_API_KEY":"YOUR_API_KEY"}}}}.

Examples of applicable scenarios include: in procurement, tracking e-commerce reviews, social followers, store distribution, brand product counts, and product ingredients; in manufacturing, tracking inventory and price changes across suppliers, monitoring lead times, and detecting supplier changes and shortage signals; in brand protection, scanning markets and websites, detecting counterfeit brands and designs, capturing timestamped screenshots, and archiving page snapshots; in marketing, crawling blog content, analyzing brand mentions, researching competitors, flagging citations in AI answers, and monitoring competitor pages; as well as monitoring webpage DOM changes, inventory, prices, job openings, and review ratings, tracking portfolio companies, building market intelligence, researching companies at scale, and automating GTM and recruiting, among others.

Regarding limitations and costs, the official website calls it the most cost-effective web data API on the market and lists: a free trial for $0 with no credit card required, including 500 successful requests, with all requests JS-rendered and using residential IPs, and a lower rate limit; Starter at $9/month, including 5,000 successful requests and 150 concurrent requests, at a cost of $0.495 per thousand; Standard at $99/month, including 200,000 successful requests and 500 concurrent requests, at a cost of $0.399 per thousand; Scale at $399/month, including 1 million successful requests and AI-driven browser automation. For users with fluctuating usage or who dislike subscriptions, credit packs valid for 6 months can be purchased. Other specific limitations are not provided for now.