ScraperAPI Research Agent

End-to-end autonomous research: ScraperAPI finds and fetches sources → Anthropic Files API ingests them as cited documents → Claude synthesizes a report.

Run it:

# Install dependencies
pip install requests anthropic

# Set env vars
export SCRAPERAPI_API_KEY=your-key
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your-key

# Run
python skills/scraperapi-research-agent/scripts/research_agent.py \
  --question "What are the best practices for rate limiting in web APIs?" \
  --max-sources 5 \
  --output report.md

See [scripts/researchagent.py](scripts/researchagent.py) for the full implementation.

Planning Checklist

Before starting a research run, establish:

• Question clarity — Is the question specific enough to produce useful search queries? Vague questions like "tell me about AI" produce noise. Better: "What are the tradeoffs between RAG and fine-tuning for domain-specific LLMs?"
• Source count — How many sources are needed? 3–5 is usually sufficient for a factual summary; 8–10 for a comparative analysis. More sources = more ScraperAPI credits.
• Recency — Does the answer depend on recent events? Search queries will use recent date filters.
• Credit budget — Each source costs ~1 credit to scrape (more with JS rendering). 5 sources = ~5–10 credits total.
• Stop condition — Define when to stop. The default stop is --max-sources (5). Do not loop indefinitely.

Research Loop

1. PLAN
   ↓ Claude decomposes the question into 2–3 targeted search queries

2. DISCOVER
   ↓ ScraperAPI google/search structured endpoint → list of (url, title, snippet)

3. DEDUPLICATE
   ↓ Filter to top N unique URLs (default: 5), skipping PDFs and low-quality domains

4. FETCH
   ↓ ScraperAPI scrape each URL as markdown (output_format=markdown)
   ↓ Skip pages returning < 200 characters (blocked, error pages)

5. UPLOAD
   ↓ Upload each scraped page to Anthropic Files API as a text/plain artifact
   ↓ Store file_id for each source

6. SYNTHESIZE
   ↓ Claude (claude-opus-4-8, adaptive thinking) reads all document artifacts
   ↓ Returns structured report with inline citations [1], [2]...

7. CLEAN UP
   ↓ Delete uploaded file artifacts from Anthropic
   ↓ Write or print the final report

STOP when: max_sources reached, or all queries exhausted (whichever comes first).

Stop Conditions

The agent stops when any of the following is true:

1. --max-sources reached (default: 5) — limits credit spend
2. All search queries exhausted — no more URLs to explore
3. --max-credits exceeded — hard cap on ScraperAPI credit use (optional)

Without stop conditions, a research loop will keep fetching until credits are gone.

Key Parameters

Output Format

See [assets/reporttemplate.md](assets/reporttemplate.md) for the report structure.

The report is a markdown document with:

• Title derived from the research question
• Summary — 2–3 sentence executive summary
• Findings — structured sections with inline [N] citations
• Sources — numbered bibliography with URLs and titles

Credit Cost Estimate

Prompt caching applies to the scraped content on repeated runs for the same question.

ScraperAPI Endpoints Used

• Google Search — GET https://api.scraperapi.com/structured/google/search — finds source URLs
• Scrape — GET https://api.scraperapi.com/?output_format=markdown — fetches page content

See ScraperAPI docs for rate limits and credit costs.

Anthropic APIs Used

• Files API (beta) — uploads scraped pages as document artifacts
• Messages API — Claude synthesizes the report with citations

Requires ANTHROPICAPIKEY with access to claude-opus-4-8 and the Files API beta.