web-shooter

A fast web reader for AI assistants, served over MCP. It reads web pages and PDFs and returns only the passages that answer the question, not whole pages. It runs locally and keeps nothing.

Why it's better

Live benchmark on 32 questions (web pages, JSON APIs, PDFs), 2026-10-31:

Tool	Median latency	Avg tokens returned	Answer present
web-shooter	793 ms	1,081	29/32
Firecrawl, cache allowed	1,207 ms	25,409	28/32
Firecrawl, fresh	1,548 ms	25,025	28/32
Jina Reader	2,046 ms	25,345	24/32

Faster, and about 23× fewer tokens, with the same accuracy. Caveats and the held-out check are in docs/guide.md.

Tools

Tool	Use it when	Returns
fetch(urls, query?, keywords?, max_tokens?)	You have URLs (or local PDF paths)	The best passages, grouped by page; whole pages without a query. Pages built by JavaScript are loaded in headless Chrome automatically
links(url, query?, keywords?, max_links?)	You want to choose which page to read next	The page's links, ranked by the query
crawl(url, query, keywords?, max_pages?, max_depth?, other_sites?, max_results?)	You have a start page and a goal, not the URLs	The most relevant pages, as URLs with one-line snippets

Setup

1. Install (macOS on Apple Silicon, Linux, Windows):

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/heyyviv/web-shooter/releases/latest/download/web-shooter-installer.sh | sh

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -c "irm https://github.com/heyyviv/web-shooter/releases/latest/download/web-shooter-installer.ps1 | iex"

Or from source (Rust 1.88+, and the only route on Intel Macs):

cargo install --git https://github.com/heyyviv/web-shooter

2. Register it. In Claude Code:

claude mcp add --scope user web-shooter -- web-shooter

Then run /mcp or start a new session. For Claude Desktop, Cursor and other clients, add a stdio server with the absolute path to the binary:

{ "mcpServers": { "web-shooter": { "command": "/absolute/path/to/web-shooter" } } }

The first query downloads a 30 MB embedding model. Pages built by JavaScript need Chrome installed.

More

docs/guide.md covers usage, configuration, updating, limits and development. docs/how-it-works.md explains the internals.

• MCP Registry name: mcp-name: io.github.heyyviv/web-shooter

License

Licensed under either of Apache License 2.0 or MIT license, at your option.