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Jina Reader

Prepend r.jina.ai/ to any URL and get LLM-ready markdown — JS rendering, PDFs and Office docs, image captioning, and s.jina.ai for read-the-results search.

freemiumplatform
Updated Jun 11, 2026
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Jina Reader is the zero-integration web-content tool: prefix any URL with https://r.jina.ai/ and get clean, LLM-ready markdown — headless-Chrome rendering, PDFs and Office files, images auto-captioned for text-only models. s.jina.ai searches and returns the full content of the top results. Apache-2.0 open-source branch, generous keyed free tier.

Jina Reader won its niche with the lowest possible integration cost: it's a URL prefix. No SDK, no schema, no session — r.jina.ai/ in front of any link returns the page as clean markdown, which makes it the tool agents and scripts reach for when "just read this page" is the whole requirement.

Highlights

  • URL-prefix simplicity — https://r.jina.ai/<url> from curl, a browser, or any HTTP client; the API is the URL bar.
  • Real-web handling — headless Chrome for JS-heavy pages with an auto-selected curl fast path; PDFs via PDF.js and Word/Excel/PowerPoint via LibreOffice, including direct binary upload.
  • Vision built in — images are auto-captioned into alt text, so text-only models don't lose the figures.
  • Output control via headers — markdown/html/text/screenshot, CSS-scoped extraction (x-target-selector), engine and cache controls.
  • s.jina.ai — query in, full content of the top five results out: search and read collapsed into one call.
  • Open core — the Apache-2.0 repo is the working stateless engine behind the endpoints (SaaS storage layer excluded), self-hostable via Docker.

In an AI-assisted workflow

curl "https://r.jina.ai/https://example.com/docs/page"        # page → markdown
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $JINA_KEY" "https://s.jina.ai/your+query"   # search → full contents

Its agent role is the lightweight fetcher: the "read this URL" tool in a research loop, the one-off ingester feeding RAG — anywhere Firecrawl's crawl-scale machinery would be overkill.

TIP

The free tier's shape rewards a key even for hobby use: keyless is ~20 RPM with slower service, while a free key is 500 RPM plus a ten-million-token grant — and unlocks search.

Good to know

Jina AI was acquired by Elastic (completed October 2025; founder Han Xiao became Elastic's VP of AI) with products continuing — Reader's repo stayed active through 2026. Token-based billing scales with output length, so giant pages cost more. Versus the field: Firecrawl for crawl/extract at scale, Tavily for the all-in-one agent layer, Exa for semantic search — mapped in Getting Web Data into AI Agents.

Frequently asked questions

How do I use Jina Reader?
Prepend the prefix — curl https://r.jina.ai/https://example.com/article returns the page as markdown. No SDK, no account for light use (keyless is throttled to ~20 requests/minute); a free API key raises Reader to 500 RPM, unlocks s.jina.ai search, and comes with a large token grant. Output and engine are tunable via headers (x-respond-with, x-engine, x-target-selector).
What's s.jina.ai?
Search that reads: it runs your query, then fetches and fully extracts the top five results through the same Reader stack — so instead of titles and snippets, your agent gets the actual content of the best pages in one call. It requires an API key.
Is Jina Reader still maintained after the Elastic acquisition?
Yes — Elastic completed its acquisition of Jina AI in October 2025 and committed to continuing its products; the Reader repo saw a re-platform in 2025 and its open-source branch was re-synced with the SaaS code in April 2026. Note the repo is the stateless core — the SaaS storage layer isn't included, so self-hosting isn't full feature parity.

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