Jina Reader

Turns any URL into clean markdown via a simple API prefix

By Nathan KesslerUpdated Jul 27, 2026

Each tool is evaluated against our methodology using public docs, vendor demos, and hands-on testing.

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What is Jina Reader?

Jina Reader converts any URL into clean, LLM-ready markdown or JSON: just prepend r.jina.ai to the address. A companion endpoint, s.jina.ai, handles web search. It reads PDFs natively, captions images, runs custom pre-extraction JavaScript, and supports proxy and locale customization across 29 languages. The core reader code is open source on GitHub (Apache-2.0, about 11.7K stars), and Jina AI also ships ReaderLM-v2, a 1.5B-parameter HTML-to-Markdown/JSON model under a non-commercial license.

Our verdict

Jina Reader suits teams that want a single API prefix to turn web pages into LLM-ready text without building their own scraping pipeline. Its companion model, ReaderLM-v2, has a non-commercial license, so anyone wanting to self-host the underlying conversion model for commercial use has to look elsewhere or stick with the hosted API.

Categories:

AI Extraction

AI extraction tools sit between a raw page and your database: you describe the fields you want, and a model returns structured JSON or LLM-ready markdown without hand-written selectors. They hold up well when page layouts change often, at the cost of per-request model spend and the occasional wrong field.