Quick Start

This guide walks you through your first data extraction from start to finish. You'll extract a list of items from a webpage in under 5 minutes.

Before You Begin

• CrawlPilot is installed and pinned to your toolbar.
• Chrome has permission to run CrawlPilot on websites. If you haven't granted this yet, see Permissions.

Step 1 — Open a Page with List Data

Navigate to any page that shows a list of repeated items. Good examples for a first try:

• A Google search results page
• An e-commerce category page (Amazon, eBay, Etsy)
• A blog's article listing page
• A job board search results page

For this walkthrough, we'll use an e-commerce site showing product cards.

Step 2 — Open CrawlPilot

Click the CrawlPilot icon in your Chrome toolbar. The side panel slides open on the right side of your browser.

You'll see the Home screen with tool shortcuts. Click List Extractor.

[!TIP] If the panel shows "Tab not connected", click Connect Tab at the top of the panel.

Step 3 — Pick the Container

The container is the parent element that holds all your list items (the product grid, the <ul>, etc.).

1. 02
   Click Pick Container (the crosshair button).
2. 04
   Move your mouse over the page — elements highlight as you hover.
3. 06
   Hover over the area that contains all your items together. When you see all items highlighted with a green outline, you're in the right place.
4. 08
   Click to confirm.

CrawlPilot shows you the detected CSS selector. Item count appears below it (e.g., "24 items found").

[!TIP] Use the ↑ Up and ↓ Down arrow buttons in the picker toolbar to navigate to a parent or child element if the selection isn't quite right.

Step 4 — Pick One Item

Now select a single repeating item within that container.

1. 02
   Click Pick Item.
2. 04
   Hover over one item (one product card, one article row).
3. 06
   Click to confirm.

CrawlPilot automatically detects sibling items and shows how many it found.

Step 5 — Review the Schema

CrawlPilot analyzes the selected item and generates a column schema — a list of the fields it detected:

• Rename a column by clicking its name
• Delete columns you don't need
• Leave everything else as-is for now

Step 6 — Start Extraction

Click Start Extraction. Watch the item count grow in real-time as CrawlPilot reads the page.

For a single page with no pagination, extraction finishes in seconds.

Step 7 — View and Export Your Data

When the extraction completes:

1. 02
   Click View Data — a new tab opens with your data in a full grid view.
2. 04
   Review the rows and columns.
3. 06
   Click Export CSV to download your data as a spreadsheet.

That's it — you've completed your first extraction.

What's Next?

• More pages: Learn how to scrape across multiple pages using List Extractor pagination.
• Bulk URLs: Extract data from a list of URLs with the Page Extractor.
• Images: Download all images from a page with the Image Downloader.