URLtoText Blog
Practical guides on extracting text from websites, web scraping, and getting web content into AI tools.
Latest · Guides
How to Extract Text From an Image (Photos, Screenshots and Scans)
Extract text from an image on any device: a free image to text converter, Google Lens, iPhone and Mac Live Text, Windows Snipping Tool, AI chatbots and Python.
· 17 min read
Guides
How to Extract Text From a PDF (Including Scanned PDFs)
Extract text from any PDF, including scanned PDFs with OCR: a free PDF to text converter, Acrobat, Google Docs, Mac Preview, Word, pdftotext and Python.
· 15 min read
Guides
How to Generate Subtitles From a Video (Free SRT and VTT)
Generate subtitles from any video for free: auto captions with a subtitle generator, YouTube Studio, CapCut, Premiere or Whisper, then add the SRT or VTT anywhere.
· 17 min read
Guides
What Is llms.txt? How to Create One for Your Website (With Examples)
What llms.txt is, who reads it, and how to create one: the format, a full example file, llms-full.txt, generators and plugins, hosting, testing and updates.
· 19 min read
Guides
How to Get a Podcast Transcript (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or Any MP3)
How to get a podcast transcript on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube, find any episode's MP3 in its RSS feed and transcribe it free, and publish transcripts.
· 16 min read
Guides
How to Save a Webpage as a PDF (Every Browser, iPhone and Android)
How to save a webpage as a PDF in Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox, on iPhone and Android, plus fixes for cut-off pages, missing images and messy layouts.
· 18 min read
Guides
How to Summarize a YouTube Video (Free, in Any Language)
Summarize a YouTube video for free: a YouTube video summarizer, Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude with ready-made prompts, YouTube's Ask button, and long videos.
· 14 min read
Guides
How to Transcribe Audio to Text (Free and Paid Options)
How to transcribe audio to text for free: online tools, Word, Google Docs, iPhone Voice Memos, Pixel Recorder, Otter, Whisper and Zoom, Meet or Teams meetings.
· 17 min read
Guides
How to Transcribe a TikTok Video to Text
Transcribe a TikTok video to text for free: paste the link, turn on TikTok's captions, or upload a recording. Plus translating, photo posts and bulk research.
· 15 min read
Guides
How to Get the Transcript of a YouTube Video
Get any YouTube video transcript: Show transcript on desktop and mobile, a free generator, SRT files, other languages, videos without captions, and an API.
· 17 min read
Web Scraping
Best Web Scraping Tools (No-Code, Libraries, and APIs)
The best web scraping tools compared: no-code scrapers, open-source libraries like Scrapy, Selenium, and Playwright, plus scraping APIs, and what each is for.
· 9 min read
Guides
How to Copy Text From a Website (Even When Copying Is Blocked)
How to copy text from a website: paste without formatting, get around sites that block copying or right-click, copy on mobile, use OCR, or grab a whole page.
· 8 min read
Guides
How to Extract Text From a Website: 5 Easy Methods
Five ways to extract text from any website, from copy and paste to browser tools, free online converters, Python, and an API. Pick the right one for one page or thousands.
· 5 min read
Guides
HTML to Plain Text Conversion: Methods, Tools, and Code
HTML to plain text conversion methods for Python, JavaScript, and the command line, plus online tools, common pitfalls, and when to use HTML to Markdown.
· 9 min read
Legal & Ethics
Indeed Web Scraping: Terms of Service, robots.txt, and What's Allowed
Does Indeed allow web scraping? What Indeed's terms of service say about automated access, what its robots.txt disallows, the risks, and legal alternatives.
· 9 min read
Legal & Ethics
Is Web Scraping Legal? US Law and Commercial Use
Is web scraping legal in the US? What hiQ v. LinkedIn, Van Buren, and Meta v. Bright Data decided, plus copyright, terms of service, and commercial use rules.
· 9 min read
Automation
How to Convert HTML to Text in Make.com (and Extract Text From Any URL)
Use the Make.com HTML to text module in the Text parser app, or call an API from the HTTP module to extract text or Markdown from any URL in your scenarios.
· 8 min read
Web Scraping
How to Make Money With Web Scraping: Legitimate Business Ideas
How to make money with web scraping legally: seven business ideas, who pays for each, what to deliver, how hard each one is, and how to stay within the law.
· 8 min read
Guides
How to Prevent Web Scraping on Your Website
How to prevent web scraping on your site: robots.txt, nginx rate limiting, bot management, CAPTCHAs, honeypots, blocking AI crawlers, and legal steps like DMCA.
· 9 min read
Web Scraping
Python Web Scraping: Why Python Is the Best Choice (With a BeautifulSoup Tutorial)
Why Python is used for web scraping, how it compares to Node.js, a step-by-step BeautifulSoup tutorial, and how to scrape JavaScript pages with Playwright.
· 8 min read
Guides
How to Remove Ads From News Articles and Read Without Ads
Remove ads from any news article in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, iPhone and Android: one-click extensions, reader mode, ad blockers and phone-wide fixes.
· 16 min read
Web Scraping
Web Scraping vs API: Differences, Pros and Cons, and When to Use Each
Web scraping vs API: how each one gets data, the pros and cons, a side-by-side comparison table, code examples, and how to decide which to use for your project.
· 8 min read