CrustAPI is a web scraper API that turns Google searches and public LinkedIn pages into clean JSON. Twelve Google search types, five LinkedIn surfaces, one key. You only pay when a query returns results.
The term covers two different products. A crawling API takes any URL you give it, handles the proxies and browser rendering, and returns the raw page. You still write the parsing, and you maintain it every time the page changes. Zyte, ScrapingBee, and Firecrawl are good tools in that lane.
A data API takes a query instead. It does the scraping, the parsing, and the schema work, and it returns structured JSON that looks the same every time. CrustAPI is a data API. We cover Google search and public LinkedIn pages, and we keep the parsers working so you never think about markup.
That focus is a real limit. If your job is pulling content from thousands of arbitrary websites, a crawling API is the better buy. If you need search results, business listings, reviews, or people data, keep reading.
Everything runs through two GET endpoints with your key in the x-api-key header. You change the type parameter, never the endpoint.
| Surface | Call | What comes back |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search | /v1/search?type=web | Organic results with positions, knowledge graph, people-also-ask, related searches |
| Google Maps | type=maps · places | Up to 100 businesses per search: name, address, phone, website, rating, review count, categories, hours |
| Google Reviews | type=reviews | The actual reviews for any place: rating, text, author, date, sorted and paginated, ~0.3s |
| Google verticals | news · shopping · images · videos · scholar · patents · autocomplete | Each vertical parsed to its own stable schema. Images returns ~97 images per credit |
| Any webpage | type=webpage | One URL in, clean page text, metadata, and JSON-LD out. Markdown on request |
| LinkedIn public | /v1/linkedin?type= search · profile · company · jobs · posts | Public profiles, companies, jobs, and posts. People results carry a verified email when one can be found |
The webpage type is the general-purpose one. Give it any URL and it fetches the page, strips the markup, and returns the text plus metadata and any JSON-LD on the page. Add includeMarkdown=true for a markdown version. It is a plain HTTP fetch with no JavaScript rendering, so pages that only render through JS come back thin. Good for articles, docs, and product pages feeding a RAG pipeline.
I ran this today. It returned 3 businesses in about a second of server time. Here is the request, the first record as CSV, then the same record as JSON.
That call cost 3 credits, one per business returned. Maps records carry name, address, phone, website, rating, review count, categories, and hours. They do not carry email addresses. Verified emails come from the LinkedIn people endpoints below.
The same key hits GET /v1/linkedin. Five types: search finds people by keywords, profile pulls a public profile by URL, and company, jobs, and posts do what they say. Everything comes from public, logged-out pages. People results carry a verified email when one can be found, which is the piece a lead list actually needs.
Full details with real responses: LinkedIn people search API · LinkedIn scraper API
One flat credit per successful call, and Maps bills one credit per business returned. A query that returns nothing costs nothing, and a failed query costs nothing. Prepaid packs, and credits never expire: 25k for $49 · 100k for $149 · 500k for $549 · 2.5M for $1,999, all self-serve, ex-tax. The free tier is 3,000 queries a month with no card. Try any type in the playground or read the docs.
When a crawling API is the better pick: you need raw HTML or content from arbitrary sites at scale, you need JavaScript rendering on pages outside our coverage, or you are building a general crawler with your own parsers. Zyte, ScrapingBee, Firecrawl, and tools like them are built for exactly that and do it well. We stay narrow on structured search and social data and go deep there instead.
Related: Google Search API · Google Maps scraper API · Google Reviews API
3,000 free credits covers a real project. Send one request and look at the JSON that comes back.
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