Feed any website to your AI in one command
One command turns a web page into clean Markdown, with the menus and cookie banners stripped out. Save whole docs sections, pull tables off pages as data, and ask your own local AI about what you saved, all with free tools on your laptop.
- A table pulled off a web page as tidy data, with no AI involved
- Your own local AI answering questions from those notes, with nothing leaving your laptop
- Windows 10 or 11, a Mac, or Linux
- About 1.5GB of free disk space (most of it is the browser Crawl4AI drives)
- No coding experience. You'll paste a few short scripts into a text editor, and every line that matters is explained.
- For the last step: Ollama and Gemma 4 from Run a ChatGPT-style AI on your own laptop. Gemma 4 needs Ollama 0.20.7 or newer: check with
ollama --version.
Install Crawl4AI and its browser
Crawl4AI drives a real, hidden copy of Chrome, so it sees pages the way you do, including ones built with JavaScript.
Crawl4AI is a free, open-source Python tool (Apache 2.0 licence). You don't need to know Python: a small installer called uv does the setup for you. If you already have uv from another lesson, skip the first command.
Windows (only if you don't have uv)winget install --id astral-sh.uv -eMac or Linux (only if you don't have uv; on a Mac, brew install uv works too)curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | shClose the terminal and open a new one. Make a folder for your notes and go into it:
Windowsmkdir $HOME\web-notes cd $HOME\web-notesMac/Linuxmkdir ~/web-notes && cd ~/web-notesNow make a private Python setup inside that folder. Crawl4AI supports Python 3.10 to 3.13, not the newest 3.14, so ask for 3.12 (uv downloads it if you don't have it):
Terminaluv venv --python 3.12OutputUsing CPython 3.12.13 Creating virtual environment at: .venv Activate with: .venv\Scripts\activateTipIgnore the "Activate with" line. On many Windows PCs it fails with "running scripts is disabled". You don't need it: puttinguv runin front of a command uses this folder's setup automatically.Install Crawl4AI, then let it download the browser it uses:
Terminaluv pip install crawl4ai uv run crawl4ai-setupExpect a couple of minutes in total. The folder grows to about 555MB. The setup downloads Chromium twice (once for Playwright, once for a helper called Patchright), but both land in the same place, about 700MB in
%LOCALAPPDATA%\ms-playwrighton Windows or~/Library/Caches/ms-playwrighton a Mac.Finally, run its built-in health check. It fetches one page from crawl4ai.com:
Terminaluv run crawl4ai-doctorOutput[INIT].... → Running Crawl4AI health check... [INIT].... → Crawl4AI 0.9.4 [TEST].... ℹ Testing crawling capabilities... ... [COMPLETE] ● ✅ Crawling test passed!
uv run crawl4ai-doctor ends with Crawling test passed!If it breaks'uv' is not recognised + 3 more
'uv' is not recognised
"running scripts is disabled on this system"
uv run in front of each command instead, exactly as this mission does."Executable doesn't exist at ...ms-playwright..."
uv run crawl4ai-setup again from your web-notes folder."No module named 'crawl4ai'" or "Failed to spawn: crwl"
cd $HOME\web-notes (Mac/Linux: cd ~/web-notes) first. uv run only finds the setup in the folder you're in.