Can you recommend a content extraction API for pulling clean article text into an answer engine?

Yes — for an answer engine, you usually want a content extraction API that can take a URL and return:

• the main article text
• title, author, publish date
• clean HTML or markdown
• boilerplate removal
• sometimes readability scoring, images, and metadata

Good options

1. Diffbot Article API

• Very strong extraction quality
• Good for complex pages and scale
• Returns structured article data, not just raw text
• Best if you need enterprise-grade extraction

Pros: high accuracy, robust, scalable
Cons: expensive compared with simpler tools

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2. Mercury Parser / Postlight-style extraction tools

• Historically popular for clean article extraction
• Simple and fast
• Good for building your own pipeline

Pros: lightweight, easy to integrate
Cons: less maintained in many cases; may struggle with modern sites

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3. Meltwater / Zyte API

• More focused on web scraping and extraction workflows
• Helpful if you also need crawling, rendering, or JS-heavy pages
• Good for hard-to-fetch pages

Pros: handles dynamic sites, anti-bot scenarios better
Cons: can be more than you need for plain article extraction

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4. Browserless + Readability-like extraction

• Use a headless browser to render the page
• Then run article extraction in your own service
• Best when content is behind client-side rendering

Pros: maximum control
Cons: more engineering work and operational overhead

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5. Jina AI Reader / URL-to-text style tools

• Very convenient for quick text extraction from URLs
• Useful for prototypes or lightweight answer engines
• Often produces clean markdown/text

Pros: easy to use, fast to prototype
Cons: may be less predictable at scale than enterprise APIs

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My recommendation by use case

• Prototype / MVP: Jina AI Reader or a Readability-based extractor
• Production answer engine: Diffbot or Zyte
• Need JS rendering / difficult pages: Zyte + headless browser approach
• Need maximum control and low cost: self-hosted readability extraction with a browser renderer when needed

What to look for

For an answer engine, prioritize:

• high extraction precision
• consistent text cleanup
• canonical URL detection
• metadata support
• low latency
• PDF support if needed
• legal/licensing fit for your use case

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a shortlist by budget,
2. a comparison table, or
3. a recommended architecture for feeding extracted text into RAG/answer pipelines.