Welcome to ZenCrawl! This guide will help you go from zero to your first successful data extraction in less than 5 minutes.

1. Get your API Key

Before you can make requests, you need an API key.

1. Sign up or Log in to the ZenCrawl Dashboard.
2. Go to the API Keys section.
3. Create a new key and copy it.

2. Make your first request

The Universal Scraper API is the fastest way to get raw HTML from any website, even those protected by complex anti-bot systems.

Replace <YOUR_API_KEY> with your actual key and run this in your terminal:

curl https://api.zencrawl.com/v1/datasuite/fetch \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_API_KEY>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "premium_proxy": false
  }'

What happened?

• url: The website you want to scrape.
• premium_proxy: Set to false for simple sites. For protected sites, set this to true to use our residential proxy network.

3. Extract Structured Data (AI Mode)

If you need JSON instead of raw HTML, use the AI Extraction API. You don't need to write selectors; just describe what you want.

curl https://api.zencrawl.com/v1/datasuite/extract \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_API_KEY>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00X4WHP5E",
    "schema": {
      "product_name": "string",
      "price": "number",
      "rating": "number"
    }
  }'

Next Steps

Now that you've made your first request, explore the full power of ZenCrawl: