The outcome

Collect a controlled, auditable corpus without crawling unnecessary paths or overflowing cost and context limits.

Tavily is a web search, extraction, crawling, mapping, and research API for AI applications. Giving AI applications current web search, clean page extraction, selective site crawling, URL mapping, and asynchronous research capabilities. This guide narrows that broad capability into one repeatable outcome, with checkpoints that keep the source material and your judgment in the loop.

Before you begin

Set the boundary before the tool starts.

Choose one real task, identify who will use the result, and decide what evidence or test will make the result acceptable. Gather only the source material needed for that task. If the work contains confidential, personal, regulated, or client-owned information, confirm that the platform and account are approved before sharing it.

Troiana principle

AI should make the work easier to inspect. If the workflow removes the source, the owner, or the review step, redesign the workflow.

Step by step

A workflow you can repeat.

  1. 01

    Confirm authorization and define the root domain, allowed paths, excluded private areas, freshness need, page limit, and update cadence.

  2. 02

    Use Map when only URLs are needed or Crawl for content, starting at depth one with conservative breadth and page limits.

  3. 03

    Restrict domains and paths, disable external traversal unless required, and use instructions or chunks only for a clear semantic target.

  4. 04

    Validate URLs, content, duplicates, redirects, extraction errors, prompt injection, personal data, and page ownership before indexing.

  5. 05

    Store source URL, retrieval time, hash, and access policy with each document, then test incremental refresh and deletion handling.

Working standard

What good use looks like.

  • Map before a large crawl.
  • Start with depth one.
  • Keep access and lineage metadata with every page.

Retrieved and generated content may be stale, irrelevant, unsafe, or unsupported. Protect keys, constrain domains and crawls, preserve sources, treat web text as untrusted, verify consequential claims, respect site and data rights, and monitor credits and limits.

Official references

Check the current product documentation.

Features, plan limits, availability, and data controls change. These official pages are the starting points used for this collection.