Cookbook·News and media·sfchronicle.com

Scrape sports pages on sfchronicle.com

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

99.7% success · Aug 2026Browser on 18% of callsStandard price · 1 credit

About sfchronicle.com

sfchronicle.com describes itself as “Exclusive Bay Area and San Francisco breaking news, sports, tech, and food and wine coverage, plus enhanced coverage of Giants, 49ers and Warriors”.

Its sitemaps list 1,567 URLs across 19 files (16140000-16145000, 16380000-16385000, 18000000-18005000, 18365000-18370000, 18380000-18385000, 18395000-18400000). 1 of the 1,567 dated entries changed in the last 30 days, the newest on 31 Aug 2026.

Its robots.txt names 4 sitemaps and disallows 11 paths, among them /api, /adtest, /search.

Measured on Crawlbase

Success rate over every request from every account in August 2026: 99.7%. Patterns, countries and failures come from the request log since 14 Aug 2026; 17.8% of successful calls used the JavaScript token and the median answer took 2.1s.

Among the 74 news and media sites in the Cookbook, sfchronicle.com ranks 21 of 74 by success rate; the category median is 98.9%. Its median answer of 2.1s sits at 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.sfchronicle.com%2Fsports"

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

r = api.get('https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports')
html = r['body']

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

const r = await api.get('https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports');

Parameters that matter

Parameter	Set it to	Why
`country`	leave unset	Most successful calls set no country (100%) and succeed at 99.6%.
`javascript`	leave unset	Plain-token calls succeed at 99.8% and make up 95.1% of the traffic. A browser costs more and, on this site, buys nothing.

URL patterns accounts fetch

Pattern	Share of successes	JavaScript token	Country	Query parameters
`/sports`	24.0%	0.0%	none	none
`/opinion`	23.8%	0.0%	none	none
`/{slug}`	23.5%	0.0%	none	none
`/entertainment`	23.5%	0.0%	none	none
`/food/{slug}/{slug}`	3.8%	100%	none	none

Fields you get

Structured data Crawlbase found on sfchronicle.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, WebSite
Article: NewsArticle, WebPage

What breaks, and the fix

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

504: 40.0% 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.

403: 30.0% of failures A 403 is the site refusing the exit. Set the country the successful calls use and retry once; a second 403 means the URL itself is protected.

451: 20.0% of failures 451 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.

503: 10.0% 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 2.1s.

Questions

Do I need a browser to scrape sfchronicle.com?

No. 99.8% of plain-token calls succeed and accounts send 95.1% of their traffic without a browser.

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

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

Which country should I set for sfchronicle.com?

None is needed: most successful calls leave it unset.

Other pages on sfchronicle.com

Pages sfchronicle.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, WebSite	sfchronicle.com/	Plain	none	3.0s
Article `/{slug}/article/{slug}` Structured data: NewsArticle, WebPage	none	Plain	none	2.1s

Measured on CrawlbaseAUGUST 2026

Success rate99.7%

Needs browser18% 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 sfchronicle.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