Cookbook·News and media·theguardian.com
Scrape business pages on theguardian.com
The call that returns business pages from theguardian.com today, with the parameters, patterns and failure modes read off the request log since 14 Aug 2026. Last tested 6 Sep 2026.
99.8% success · Aug 2026Browser on 28% of callsStandard price · 1 credit
About theguardian.com
theguardian.com describes itself as “Latest international news, sport and comment from the Guardian”.
Its sitemaps list 374 URLs across 2 files (news, video). 374 of the 374 dated entries changed in the last 30 days, the newest on 6 Sep 2026.
Its robots.txt names 2 sitemaps and disallows 12 paths, among them /sendarticle/, /users/, /email/.
Measured on Crawlbase
Success rate over every request from every account in August 2026: 99.8%. Patterns, countries and failures come from the request log since 14 Aug 2026; 27.9% of successful calls used the JavaScript token and the median answer took 4.8s.
Among the 74 news and media sites in the Cookbook, theguardian.com ranks 16 of 74 by success rate; the category median is 98.9%. Its median answer of 4.8s 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.
curl "https://api.crawlbase.com/?token=YOUR_TOKEN&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbusiness%2F1234567%2Fexample-page"from crawlbase import CrawlingAPI api = CrawlingAPI({'token': 'YOUR_TOKEN'}) r = api.get('https://www.theguardian.com/business/1234567/example-page') html = r['body']
const { CrawlingAPI } = require('crawlbase'); const api = new CrawlingAPI({ token: 'YOUR_TOKEN' }); const r = await api.get('https://www.theguardian.com/business/1234567/example-page');
Parameters that matter
| Parameter | Set it to | Why |
|---|---|---|
country | leave unset | Most successful calls set no country (88.0%) and succeed at 100%. |
javascript | leave unset | Plain-token calls succeed at 100%, JavaScript-token calls at 99.6%. 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
/business/{id}/{slug} | 12.3% | 0.0% | none | none |
/world/{id}/{slug} | 11.5% | 4.3% | none | none |
/us-news/{id}/{slug} | 10.5% | 4.8% | none | none |
/technology/{id}/{slug} | 7.5% | 6.7% | none | none |
/football/{id}/{slug} | 6.0% | 66.7% | none | none |
/football/{slug}/{id} | 5.5% | 95.5% | none | page |
/australia-news/{id}/{slug} | 5.0% | 0.0% | none | none |
/{slug}/{id}/{slug} | 3.5% | 7.1% | none | none |
Fields you get
Structured data Crawlbase found on theguardian.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:
- Detail page:
NewsArticle, WebPage
What breaks, and the fix
Of the failures since 14 Aug 2026, the site answered:
591: 100% 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 4.8s.
Questions
Do I need a browser to scrape theguardian.com?
It depends on the page. Plain-token calls succeed at 100%, JavaScript-token calls at 99.6%; the URL pattern table shows which paths accounts fetch with a browser.
How much does a theguardian.com page cost on Crawlbase?
1 credit without a browser. theguardian.com is in the standard tier.
Which country should I set for theguardian.com?
None is needed: most successful calls leave it unset.
Other pages on theguardian.com
Pages theguardian.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/ | theguardian.com/ | Plain | none | 4.6s |
Detail page/{slug}/video/{id}Structured data: NewsArticle, WebPage | none | Plain | none | 2.1s |
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