Scrape pub pages on chess.com

About chess.com

chess.com describes itself as “Play chess online for free on Chess.com with over 250 million members from around the world. Have fun playing with friends or challenging the computer!”.

Its home page declares 12 languages: en, es, fr, de, pl, ru, sv, el, pt, it, zh, ja.

Its sitemaps list 815,301 URLs across 19 files.

Its robots.txt names 1 sitemap and disallows 12 paths, among them /en/, /cdn-cgi/, /admin.

Measured on Crawlbase

Success rate over every request from every account in August 2026: 100%. Patterns, countries and failures come from the request log since 14 Aug 2026; 0.0% of successful calls used the JavaScript token and the median answer took 601ms.

Among the 8 gaming sites in the Cookbook, chess.com ranks 1 of 8 by success rate; the category median is 99.9%. Its median answer of 601ms is faster than the category median of 1.8s. 8 of the 8 accept the plain token, this one among them.

The call

The most common shape of URL the accounts fetch, with the country and token that succeed most often. Replace the placeholder path with a real one from the site.

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

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

r = api.get('https://www.chess.com/pub/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.chess.com/pub/example-section/example-page');

Parameters that matter

URL patterns accounts fetch

Fields you get

Structured data Crawlbase found on chess.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: Organization
• Detail page: Organization, VideoObject, BreadcrumbList
• Article: Organization, NewsArticle, BreadcrumbList
• Other: Organization, BreadcrumbList

What breaks, and the fix

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

Run it on a schedule

The median answer on this site is 601ms. Push a URL list to the Crawler with a callback for anything larger than a few thousand pages a day; it paces the calls and retries what the site refuses.

Questions

Other pages on chess.com

Pages chess.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.