README

Reader




Your LLMs deserve better input.

Reader does two things:
- Read: It converts any URL to an LLM-friendly input with https://r.jina.ai/https://your.url. Get improved output for your agent and RAG systems at no cost.
- Search: It searches the web for a given query with https://s.jina.ai/your+query. This allows your LLMs to access the latest world knowledge from the web.

Check out the live demo

Or just visit these URLs (Read) https://r.jina.ai/https://github.com/jina-ai/reader, (Search) https://s.jina.ai/Who%20will%20win%202024%20US%20presidential%20election%3F and see yourself.

 Feel free to use Reader API in production. It is free, stable and scalable. We are maintaining it actively as one of the core products of Jina AI. Check out rate limit




 This repository is the open source branch of the codebase behind https://r.jina.ai and https://s.jina.ai. It runs in stateless or bucket-cached mode; the MongoDB-backed SaaS storage layer is not included here.

 Updates

- 2026-04 — Re-synchronized the open source branch with the SaaS code. The MongoDB-backed storage layer is stripped; the oss branch runs in stateless mode out of the box, with optional MinIO/S3-compatible bucket caching via docker compose. See Local development.
- 2025-12 — Storage layer decoupled and binary file uploads landed. PDFs and MS Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) can now be POSTed directly via the file body field — no need to host them first. See cookbooks.md.
- 2025-03 — Major refactor: Reader is no longer a Firebase application. The SaaS migrated off Firestore + Cloud Functions to a Cloud Run image with MongoDB Atlas, removing the platform-coupled bits and unblocking the local-Docker path above.
- 2024-05 — s.jina.ai launched, extending Reader from URL→markdown to search→markdown. PDFs added the same month — any URL ending in .pdf is parsed with PDF.js and returned as markdown.
- 2024-04 — Reader released and r.jina.ai went live as Jina AI's first SaaS API for converting URLs to LLM-friendly input.

 What Reader can read

- Web pages — rendered with headless Chrome, or fetched lightweight via curl-impersonate. Reader picks intelligently between the two.
- PDFs — any URL, parsed with PDF.js. See this NASA PDF result vs the original.
- MS Office documents — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, converted via LibreOffice and then processed as HTML/PDF.
- Images — captioned by a vision-language model, so your downstream text-only LLM gets just enough hints to reason about them.

 Usage

 Using r.jina.ai for single URL fetching
Simply prepend https://r.jina.ai/ to any URL. For example, to convert the URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence to an LLM-friendly input, use the following URL:

https://r.jina.ai/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

 Using r.jina.ai for a full website fetching (Google Colab)

 Using s.jina.ai for web search
Simply prepend https://s.jina.ai/ to your search query. Note that if you are using this in the code, ma