Cookbook·News and media·bbc.com

Scrape sport pages on bbc.com

The call that returns sport pages from bbc.com today, with the parameters, patterns and failure modes read off the request log since 14 Aug 2026. Last tested 6 Sep 2026.

97.9% success · Aug 2026Browser on 23% of callsStandard price · 1 credit

About bbc.com

bbc.com describes itself as “Visit BBC for trusted reporting on the latest world and US news, sports, business, climate, innovation, culture and much more”.

Its home page declares 2 languages: en, en-gb.

Its sitemaps list 219,696 URLs across 18 files. 4,898 of the 219,696 dated entries changed in the last 30 days, the newest on 6 Sep 2026.

Its robots.txt names 38 sitemaps and disallows 12 paths, among them /asset/.

Measured on Crawlbase

Success rate over every request from every account in August 2026: 97.9%. Patterns, countries and failures come from the request log since 14 Aug 2026; 22.6% of successful calls used the JavaScript token and the median answer took 5.4s.

Among the 74 news and media sites in the Cookbook, bbc.com ranks 49 of 74 by success rate; the category median is 98.9%. Its median answer of 5.4s is slower than the category median of 2.3s. 58 of the 74 accept the plain token; this one does on some pages only.

The call

Article pages are the shape the accounts fetch most here, with the country and token that succeed most often. Replace the placeholder path with a real article URL from the site.

Run in Playground

curl "https://api.crawlbase.com/?token=YOUR_TOKEN&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fsport%2Fexample-section%2Fexample-page"

from crawlbase import CrawlingAPI
api = CrawlingAPI({'token': 'YOUR_TOKEN'})

r = api.get('https://www.bbc.com/sport/example-section/example-page')
html = r['body']

const { CrawlingAPI } = require('crawlbase');
const api = new CrawlingAPI({ token: 'YOUR_TOKEN' });

const r = await api.get('https://www.bbc.com/sport/example-section/example-page');

Parameters that matter

Parameter	Set it to	Why
`country`	leave unset	Most successful calls set no country (86.5%) and succeed at 99.9%.
`javascript`	leave unset	Plain-token calls succeed at 100%, JavaScript-token calls at 98.3%. Both work; start without the browser and switch per URL pattern where the table below shows it.

URL patterns accounts fetch

Pattern	Share of successes	JavaScript token	Country	Query parameters
`/sport/{slug}/{slug}`	45.0%	91.7%	none	page, xtor
`/news/{slug}/{slug}`	42.5%	49.4%	none	none
`/`	2.3%	0.0%	none	none
`/news/{slug}`	2.0%	75.0%	none	none
`/news`	2.0%	0.0%	none	none

Fields you get

Structured data Crawlbase found on bbc.com, by page type. These are the schema.org types in the page, the fields your parser can read straight from the JSON-LD block:

Home: WebPage
Listing: WebPage
Other: WebPage

What breaks, and the fix

Of the failures since 14 Aug 2026, the site answered:

999: 66.7% of failures 999 means the site refused the fetch. Treat it like a block: retry once with the JavaScript token and the country the successful calls use, then stop.

504: 16.7% of failures A 504 is a timeout: the page did not finish inside the limit. Retry once, and keep your own client timeout above the median answer time shown for this site.

591: 16.7% of failures A 5xx is the site failing, not the fetch. Retry after a minute.

Run it on a schedule

News moves by the hour. Poll the section or the sitemap for new links, then push the article URLs to the Crawler with a callback so the fetches are paced. The median answer on this site is 5.4s.

Questions

Do I need a browser to scrape bbc.com?

It depends on the page. Plain-token calls succeed at 100%, JavaScript-token calls at 98.3%; the URL pattern table shows which paths accounts fetch with a browser.

How much does a bbc.com page cost on Crawlbase?

1 credit without a browser. bbc.com is in the standard tier.

Which country should I set for bbc.com?

None is needed: most successful calls leave it unset.

Other pages on bbc.com

Pages bbc.com lists in its own sitemaps, fetched by Crawlbase on 6 Sep 2026 and verified in 2 consecutive runs. Each row is the cheapest call that returned the page with its content.

Page	Example	Token	Country	Median
Home `/` Structured data: WebPage	bbc.com/	Plain	none	1.8s
Listing `/{slug}/brand/{slug}` Structured data: WebPage	none	Plain	none	1.9s
Other `/{slug}/{slug}/{slug}` Structured data: WebPage	none	Plain	none	1.8s

Measured on CrawlbaseAUGUST 2026

Success rate97.9%

Needs browser23% of calls

Price tierStandard · 1 credit

Last retest6 Sep 2026

How we count: every request from every account in the calendar month; success means Crawlbase answered with cb_status 200 and the site answered with a normal status. No sampling, no exclusions. Method

Try it

Run this recipe in the Playground with your token. Up to 5,000 free requests, no card.

Open in Playground

Run it at scale

A page of bbc.com costs 1 credit. Pay as you go needs no plan: 1,000,000 pages come to about $528, on a ladder that falls from $3 to $0.02 per 1,000 requests as volume grows, and you start with up to 5,000 free requests. Starter covers 200,000 pages a month for $99.

Starter · $99/mo All plans

Keep it fresh

Push your URL list to the Crawler with a cadence and a callback. It paces the requests, retries what the site refuses, and delivers every page to your endpoint or Cloud Storage.

See the Crawler

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Site names identify the pages a recipe fetches. Crawlbase is not affiliated with any site listed. Use recipes within the acceptable use policy.Measured numbers from August 2026, refreshed monthly