Screenshots help you monitor for visual changes on websites that text extraction might miss. Your robot can capture full pages, visible areas, or specific sections to track design changes, new images, or visual updates.
Screenshots work best when you need to:
Monitor visual changes.
Track layout modifications or design updates.
Capture images, charts, or graphics that appear on pages.
Document how a page looked at a specific time.
Monitor for new visual content.
You can train a single robot to capture a screenshot, capture 'Just text', and extract data 'From a List' on a web page.
Step 1: Start training your robot
To start training your robot, all you'll need is the URL you'd like to scrape or monitor.
From your Browse AI dashboard, click "Build New Robot".
Select either:
Extract structure data - if you'd like to scrape data from a web page
Monitor site changes - if you want to create a web monitor.
Enter the Origin URL you would like to scrape or monitor.
Click Start Training Robot.
Select Use Robot Studio and wait for your web page to load.
Step 2: How to train your robot to capture a screenshot
In the right sidebar, select 'Capture screenshot'
Choose between:
Selections: select a specific part of the page you'd like to screenshot.
Entire page: takes a screenshot of the entire page.
Visible part: takes a screenshot of the visible part of the page only.
After choosing the option(s) you want, give the screenshot(s) a name
Name your screenshot.
Click 'Finish' to finish recording your robot if you've captured all of the data you need, or keep capturing text or screenshots.
Name your robot to run it, review the data and approve it.
Viewing and downloading screenshots
Once your robot is approved, you can access the captured screenshots via your robot's task.
Click the History tab for your robot
Click into the specific task
See all of the screenshots you've trained your robot to capture
Screenshot examples
From left to right:
Selection: We selected the section that contained the companies.
Selection: We selected the section that contained the page title and description.
Visible part: What the robot saw when it visited the website.
Entire page: That's the whole webpage from top to bottom.
Capturing selections
When capturing selections from the page, move your mouse around and watch parts of the page get highlighted.
When you've identified the appropriate section, click on it and name your screenshot.
Capturing the entire page
When capturing the entire page, simply choose that option then give the screenshot a name. Since you're not selecting anything, there are no decisions to make besides what to name the screenshot.
Capturing the visible part
As with the Entire page option, the only thing you need to do is give the screenshot a name. The robot will automatically capture the part of the page that's visible.
FAQs
Q. Do screenshots show up in the robot's Table?
A. As of now, your captured screenshots will appear in the task's history but not in the data table.
Q. Are screenshots accessible via Zapier?
A. Yes, read this help article: Using a captured screenshot in a Zapier action step
Q. Are screenshots accesisble via the Browse AI API?
A. Yes, you can access captured screenshots via our API. The screenshots are available as URLs in the API response, typically beginning with https://prod-browseai-captured-data. These URLs can be used to download or further process the screenshots as needed.
Q. Is it possible to see what changed in a captured screenshot?
A. Yes, you can read this article: How to see what changed in a captured screenshot
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