I build Apify Actors for RAG pipelines — before/after: one Actor turns 41K of HTML soup into 3.6K of clean Markdown

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.

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. I ran it tonight on an Apify documentation page, exactly as a customer would the Store's default input . Before — the page as your ingestion code sees it 41,286 characters : <script src=https://cdn.cookielaw.org/scripttemplates/otSDKStub.js type=text/javascript charset=UTF-8 data-domain-script=7a8d334b-... <script type=text/javascript function OptanonWrapper {}</script <script src=https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@segment/analytics-consent-wrapper-onetrust@latest/dist/umd/analytics-onetrust.umd.js <script function {var e="analytics",t=window e || ; ...Segment snippet... } Cookie banners, consent managers, analytics loaders — thousands of characters of it before the first word of content. After — what the Actor returned 3,643 characters : --- title: "Develop Actors | Platform | Apify Documentation" language: en word count: 500 --- Develop Actors This section will guide you through the whole story of Actor development. One 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. 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. How 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. Price: $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. The Actor: https://apify.com/abdou 009/apify-web-to-markdown https://apify.com/abdou 009/apify-web-to-markdown What are you using to get web content into your RAG pipelines today — and what does its output actually look like?