{"slug": "i-build-apify-actors-for-rag-pipelines-before-after-one-actor-turns-41k-of-html", "title": "I build Apify Actors for RAG pipelines — before/after: one Actor turns 41K of HTML soup into 3.6K of clean Markdown", "summary": "A developer on Apify built a web-to-Markdown Actor for RAG ingestion that converted an Apify documentation page from 41,286 characters of raw HTML — dominated by cookie-consent and analytics scripts — into 3,643 characters of clean Markdown, and returned 236,855 characters of Arabic-language Markdown from the Arabic Wikipedia article on artificial intelligence. The Actor uses static fetching first and falls back to Playwright rendering for JavaScript-heavy pages, with failed or thin pages not charged, and runs as a standby HTTP API. Pricing is $0.003 per static page or $0.004 per browser-rendered page, plus roughly $0.50–0.70 per 1,000 pages in platform usage.", "body_md": "I build Actors on Apify — small, single-purpose tools that turn websites into structured data you can call from any pipeline. My latest one converts web pages to Markdown for RAG ingestion, and I want to show you what it actually returns, not a feature list.\n\nI ran it tonight on an Apify documentation page, exactly as a customer would (the Store's default input).\n\n**Before — the page as your ingestion code sees it (41,286 characters):**\n\n```\n<script src=https://cdn.cookielaw.org/scripttemplates/otSDKStub.js type=text/javascript charset=UTF-8 data-domain-script=7a8d334b-...>\n<script type=text/javascript>function OptanonWrapper(){}</script>\n<script src=https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@segment/analytics-consent-wrapper-onetrust@latest/dist/umd/analytics-onetrust.umd.js>\n<script>!function(){var e=\"analytics\",t=window[e]||[]; ...Segment snippet... }\n```\n\nCookie banners, consent managers, analytics loaders — thousands of characters of it before the first word of content.\n\n**After — what the Actor returned (3,643 characters):**\n\n```\n---\ntitle: \"Develop Actors | Platform | Apify Documentation\"\nlanguage: en\nword_count: 500\n---\n\n# Develop Actors\n\nThis section will guide you through the whole story of Actor development.\n```\n\nOne honest wart: a \"Copy for LLM\" widget label from the docs site leaked in right after the heading. One stray line — it's on my list.\n\n**The harder test — a page in Arabic.** I ran the Arabic Wikipedia article on artificial intelligence. Back came 236,855 characters of Markdown, language detected as `ar`, word_count 35,755, the article body clean from the first line. Fair caveat: Wikipedia's references and navboxes ride along at the tail — the body is clean, the apparatus isn't stripped.\n\nHow it works, briefly: static fetch first, Playwright rendering when a page is JavaScript-heavy, and pages that fail or come back thin are not charged. It also runs as a standby HTTP API if you want to call it like an endpoint instead of a batch job.\n\nPrice: $0.003 per page (static) or $0.004 (browser-rendered), plus platform usage of roughly $0.50–0.70 per 1,000 pages, measured on real runs.\n\nThe Actor: [https://apify.com/abdou_009/apify-web-to-markdown](https://apify.com/abdou_009/apify-web-to-markdown)\n\nWhat are you using to get web content into your RAG pipelines today — and what does its output actually look like?", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-build-apify-actors-for-rag-pipelines-before-after-one-actor-turns-41k-of-html", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/bin_sys/i-build-apify-actors-for-rag-pipelines-beforeafter-one-actor-turns-41k-of-html-soup-into-36k-1gog", "published_at": "2026-10-20 21:42:44+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-20 21:48:44.883515+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "ai-infrastructure", "large-language-models", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Apify", "Playwright", "Wikipedia", "Apify Web to Markdown Actor"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-build-apify-actors-for-rag-pipelines-before-after-one-actor-turns-41k-of-html", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-build-apify-actors-for-rag-pipelines-before-after-one-actor-turns-41k-of-html.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-build-apify-actors-for-rag-pipelines-before-after-one-actor-turns-41k-of-html.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-build-apify-actors-for-rag-pipelines-before-after-one-actor-turns-41k-of-html.jsonld"}}