Stealth Mode

Stealth mode will no longer be available from 1 November 2026. Search and Extract are unchanged.

What Stealth Mode Solves

Some pages need a real browser to render fully. Common cases:

JavaScript rendering requirements — pages that return blank HTML until scripts run
Heavy client-side frameworks — content that's assembled dynamically after the initial page load
Complex page behavior — pages that need real browser events to finish loading

Standard extraction (stealth: false) sends a direct HTTP request. This works well for the vast majority of public websites and is both fast and cost-efficient.

Stealth mode renders the page in a full browser and executes its JavaScript before returning the content. Use it only when standard extraction returns incomplete content or fails.

When to Use Stealth vs Normal

Situation	Recommendation
Public articles, blogs, documentation	Normal extraction (1 credit/URL)
E-commerce product pages	Try normal first; use stealth if the result is incomplete
Sites requiring JavaScript to render content	Stealth mode
Sites with heavy client-side rendering	Stealth mode
High-volume batch extraction	Normal mode; fall back to stealth on failure

Example

curl -X POST https://api.serpex.dev/api/crawl \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_your_api_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "urls": ["https://example-protected-site.com/product/123"],
    "stealth": true,
    "format": "html"
  }'

import { SerpexClient } from "serpex";

const client = new SerpexClient("sk_your_api_key");

const result = await client.extract({
  urls: ["https://example-protected-site.com/product/123"],
  stealth: true,
  format: "html",
});

if (result.results[0].success) {
  // Parse structured data from HTML
  console.log(result.results[0].html);
} else {
  console.error(result.results[0].error);
}

from serpex import SerpexClient

client = SerpexClient("sk_your_api_key")

result = client.extract({
    "urls": ["https://example-protected-site.com/product/123"],
    "stealth": True,
    "format": "html",
})

if result.results[0].success:
    # Parse structured data from HTML
    print(result.results[0].html)
else:
    print(result.results[0].error)

Response

The response shape is the same as normal extraction. metadata.stealth and results[].stealth (both true) show stealth mode was active.

{
  "success": true,
  "results": [
    {
      "url": "https://example-protected-site.com/product/123",
      "success": true,
      "html": "<!DOCTYPE html><html>...",
      "stealth": true,
      "status_code": 200
    }
  ],
  "metadata": {
    "total_urls": 1,
    "processed_urls": 1,
    "successful_crawls": 1,
    "failed_crawls": 0,
    "credits_used": 5,
    "stealth": true,
    "response_time": 11000,
    "timestamp": "2025-06-21T10:30:00.000Z"
  }
}

Performance

Stealth requests are significantly slower than normal extraction — each one loads the page in a full browser and waits for its JavaScript to finish executing.

Mode	Typical time per URL
Normal extraction	~1–5s
Stealth	~7–15s (up to ~25s for JavaScript-heavy sites)

Set your client timeout to at least 60 seconds for stealth requests. Batch requests (up to 10 URLs) are processed concurrently, so total time is bounded by the slowest URL — not the sum.

Cost

Stealth mode costs 5 credits per URL, compared to 1 credit per URL for normal extraction. Only use it when standard extraction is insufficient.

Normal extraction: 1 credit/URL
Stealth mode: 5 credits/URL
Repeats: 0 credits when your organization requests the same URL with the same format in stealth mode again within 5 minutes of the charged request

Failed stealth requests are not charged.