For many businesses, research and lead generation are absolutely vital but can be hard to secure. More and more companies (and individuals) rely on modern methods of getting hold of data, be it for leads or just for information. Crawling is one such method, using a process similar to the way in which Google reads websites in order to rank them, to analyse a page’s data. Crawly is a free tool for doing this with ease, saving you from writing out all the information on a page.

Get well-structured data from sites

Crawly is a very simple free tool, so it lacks advanced features but it does the job very well. This software uses Diffbot's automatic article extraction API to turn web content into structured data. In other words, not only does it grab data from sites but it also outputs it in a concise way, ready for making databases. This is great for competitor analysis or content audits. Though Crawly is currently limited to 200 pages and only articles, support for scraping more data types is coming in the future. The software extracts titles, text, HTML, comments, image and video names, language data and more. These can be downloaded as a CSV or JSON.

Fast, efficient crawling

Crawly is the ideal tool for someone who just needs a few sites crawled and isn’t very tech-savvy. There may be more advanced tools out there with more features, but this one is free and user-friendly.