unclecode/crawl4ai · error · ValueError

Failed to extract content from the website: {url}

Error message

Failed to extract content from the website: {url}

What it means

Error "Failed to extract content from the website: {url}" thrown in unclecode/crawl4ai.

Source

Thrown at crawl4ai/legacy/web_crawler.py:239

                html,
                word_count_threshold=word_count_threshold,
                css_selector=css_selector,
                only_text=kwargs.get("only_text", False),
                image_description_min_word_threshold=kwargs.get(
                    "image_description_min_word_threshold",
                    IMAGE_DESCRIPTION_MIN_WORD_THRESHOLD,
                ),
                **extra_params,
            )

            # result = get_content_of_website_optimized(url, html, word_count_threshold, css_selector=css_selector, only_text=kwargs.get("only_text", False))
            if verbose:
                print(
                    f"[LOG] 🚀 Content extracted for {url}, success: True, time taken: {time.time() - t1:.2f} seconds"
                )

            if result is None:
                raise ValueError(f"Failed to extract content from the website: {url}")
        except InvalidCSSSelectorError as e:
            raise ValueError(str(e))

        cleaned_html = sanitize_input_encode(result.get("cleaned_html", ""))
        markdown = sanitize_input_encode(result.get("markdown", ""))
        media = result.get("media", [])
        links = result.get("links", [])
        metadata = result.get("metadata", {})

        if extracted_content is None:
            if verbose:
                print(
                    f"[LOG] 🔥 Extracting semantic blocks for {url}, Strategy: {extraction_strategy.name}"
                )

            sections = chunking_strategy.chunk(markdown)
            extracted_content = extraction_strategy.run(url, sections)
            extracted_content = json.dumps(

View on GitHub (pinned to 7e80152142)

Solutions

1. Check the target URL is reachable and returns HTML; inspect the crawl result's error_message.
2. Increase page_timeout or disable JavaScript execution for simple pages.

Example fix

result = crawler.run(url, page_timeout=60000)

When it happens

Trigger: Thrown at crawl4ai/legacy/web_crawler.py:239 when the library encounters an invalid state.

Common situations: See trigger scenarios.

AI-assisted analysis of unclecode/crawl4ai@7e80152142 (2026-08-14). Data as JSON: /api/errors/8fba3f94a014f146. Report an issue: GitHub.