Web Fetcher MCP server

mcp-server-web-fetcher

A fast, dependency-light Model Context Protocol server that turns any web page into something a language model can actually read: clean Markdown, structured metadata, and a classified list of links.

Web pages are 90% chrome. Scripts, cookie banners, navigation, sidebars and tracking pixels burn context and derail reasoning. This server strips all of that on the way in, so the model sees the article and nothing else.

┌────────────┐   stdio/JSON-RPC   ┌──────────────────────┐   HTTPS   ┌──────────┐
│ MCP client │ ─────────────────► │ mcp-server-web-      │ ────────► │ web page │
│ (Claude,   │ ◄───────────────── │ fetcher              │ ◄──────── │          │
│  Kiro, …)  │  Markdown + JSON   │ fetch → clean → md   │           └──────────┘
└────────────┘                    └──────────────────────┘

Features

code fences, absolute links. No leftover HTML, even for gnarly nested tables.

• Clean Markdown output. Readability-style main-content detection, GFM tables, language-tagged

being silently cut in half.

• Context-window aware. Long pages are paginated with startIndex / nextStartIndex instead of

Open Graph, Twitter cards, JSON-LD, hreflang alternates, RSS/Atom feeds, h1–h6 outline and raw HTTP headers.

• Structured metadata. Title, description, canonical, lang, author, publish/modify dates,

classification, scope filters, de-duplication.

• Link intelligence. Absolute URLs, anchor text, rel, nofollow, internal vs external

every redirect hop, not just the first request. Credentials in URLs are stripped.

• SSRF hardening. Loopback, private, link-local and cloud-metadata addresses are blocked on

(TIMEOUT, HTTPERROR, BLOCKEDHOST, RESPONSETOOLARGE, …), a retryability flag and a recovery hint, so the model can self-correct instead of guessing.

• Predictable failures. Every error carries a stable machine-readable code

validated structuredContent, not prose they have to re-parse.

• Typed end to end. Strict Zod input schemas plus published outputSchema, so clients get

encodings), a small TTL cache, transient-failure retries and optional robots.txt enforcement.

• Well behaved. Byte caps, timeouts, redirect limits, charset sniffing (including legacy

• 115 tests, no network required. Vitest unit tests plus in-memory MCP protocol tests.

Quickstart

Requires Node.js 20.18.1 or newer (inherited from cheerio, which needs undici 7).

# run it without installing
npx -y mcp-server-web-fetcher

# or install globally
npm install -g mcp-server-web-fetcher
mcp-server-web-fetcher

The server speaks MCP over stdio, so on its own it just waits for a client. Point a client at it:

Claude Desktop

~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claudedesktopconfig.json on macOS, %APPDATA%\Claude\claudedesktopconfig.json on Windows:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "web-fetcher": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-server-web-fetcher"]
    }
  }
}

With configuration, using a global install:

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.