Website to Text

Overview

Website to Text works by parsing the HTML content of a website and extracting the text. Text extraction is done by removing the HTML tags and returning the plain text content. Advanced algorithms are used to ensure accurate text extraction.

Live Test Website to Text Source →

Formula

One function covers the whole catalog: the first argument names the source, the rest are its inputs, and the "field" pair says which single value lands in the cell. Formulas covers the grammar that applies to all of them.

=VERVE("websitetotext", A2, "field", "description")

A2 holds the url you are looking up. Drag the formula down and each row resolves on its own.

With literal values

Nothing has to come from a cell — typed values work the same way.

=VERVE("websitetotext", "https://www.bbc.com/news", "field", "description")

Inputs

Required inputs are positional, in the order below. Everything else is passed as a "name", value pair after them — the same shape as SUMIFS. Premium inputs are accepted on every plan but only take effect on plans that include them.

Input	Type	Where it goes	Description
`url`Required	string	argument 2 (A2)	The URL of the website to convert to text url

What lands in your sheet

The "field" pair is what makes the formula resolve to one cell. Its value is a dot-path from the table below, so swapping it is how you pull a different value — one formula per column.

Seeing everything at once

Drop the "field" pair and the formula returns the whole response instead: two columns, field name on the left and value on the right, spilling from the cell you typed in.

=VERVE("websitetotext", A2)

Good for exploring, not for filling down

The second row's table would land on top of the first's, and every cell after the first reads #REF! (#SPILL! in Excel). Keep one per sheet, or name a field, and leave the cells below and to the right empty.

Response fields

Paths are relative to data. Each one is exactly what the "field" pair accepts, so swapping it is how you pull a different value into a cell. On a plan without a Premium field the cell reads #PREMIUM(field) rather than a value, so a locked field never looks like a real answer.

Use as "field"	Type	Example cell value	Description
`date`	object	`null`	Publication or last modified date of the webpage
`description`	string	`Use Amazon EC2 for scalable computing capacity in the AWS Cloud so you can develop and deploy applications without hardware constraints.`	Meta description extracted from website content
`title`	string	`What is Amazon EC2?`	Primary page title extracted from HTML
`title_alt`	string	`What is Amazon EC2?`	Alternative title extracted from page content
`text`	string	Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides on-demand, scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Using Amazon EC2 reduces hardware costs so you can develop and deploy applications faster. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. You can add capacity (scale up) to handle compute-heavy tasks, such as monthly or yearly processes, or spikes in website traffic. When usage decreases, you can reduce capacity (scale down) again. An EC2 instance is a virtual server in the AWS Cloud. When you launch an EC2 instance, the instance type that you specify determines the hardware available to your instance. Each instance type offers a different balance of compute, memory, network, and storage resources. For more information, see the Amazon EC2 Instance Types Guide. Amazon EC2 provides the following high-level features: Amazon EC2 supports the processing, storage, and transmission of credit card data by a merchant or service provider, and has been validated as being compliant with Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS). For more information about PCI DSS, including how to request a copy of the AWS PCI Compliance Package, see PCI DSS Level 1. You can create and manage your Amazon EC2 instances using the following interfaces: Amazon EC2 provides the following pricing options: For a complete list of charges and prices for Amazon EC2 and more information about the purchase models, see Amazon EC2 pricing. To create estimates for your AWS use cases, use the AWS Pricing Calculator. To estimate the cost of transforming Microsoft workloads to a modern architecture that uses open source and cloud-native services deployed on AWS, use the AWS Modernization Calculator for Microsoft Workloads. To see your bill, go to the Billing and Cost Management Dashboard in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. Your bill contains links to usage reports that provide details about your bill. To learn more about AWS account billing, see AWS Billing and Cost Management User Guide. If you have questions concerning AWS billing, accounts, and events, contact AWS Support. To calculate the cost of a sample provisioned environment, see . When calculating the cost of a provisioned environment, remember to include incidental costs such as snapshot storage for EBS volumes. You can optimize the cost, security, and performance of your AWS environment using AWS Trusted Advisor. You can use AWS Cost Explorer to analyze the cost and usage of your EC2 instances. You can view data up to the last 13 months, and forecast how much you are likely to spend for the next 12 months. For more information, see Analyzing your costs and usage with AWS Cost Explorer in the AWS Cost Management User Guide.	Complete extracted text content from website
`language`	string	`en`	Detected language code of website content (e.g. en)
`publisher`	object	`null`	Publisher or source organization of webpage
`url`	string	`https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/concepts`	Original URL provided for text conversion

Filling a whole column

Both platforms make one batched call for a column rather than one request per cell, and both cost the same — 10 credits per row looked up. How you write it differs, because the two runtimes batch at different points.

Rows 2–100 in one call

=VERVE("websitetotext", A2:A100, "field", "description")

In Google Sheets, give the arguments ranges and the answers spill down from the cell you typed in. Custom functions there run synchronously and in isolation, so dragged cells cannot be coalesced — the range form is how a column becomes one call. The "field" pair is required here: a per-row two-column table has nowhere to spill. Use a full column per input (A2:A100, not A2) — a single-cell reference is read as row 1 only and the rest of the column comes back blank.

In Excel, type the formula once and fill down — no range form and none needed, because its runtime is asynchronous and the add-in coalesces the calls a fill produces into a single batched request. Do not hand VERVE.CALL a range: Excel flattens it into positional arguments, so A2:A100 arrives as a hundred separate arguments and the cell reads #ERR rather than filling.

Either way, column A holds your url values and the answers land beside them, one row each, blank rows skipped.

When a cell doesn't fill

A failed lookup returns readable text starting with #ERR rather than a spreadsheet error, because Excel cannot show a custom message on a real error — you would get a bare #VALUE! with no reason. The trade-off is that IFERROR() will not catch it; test with LEFT(cell, 4) = "#ERR" instead. Error handling covers the rest.

Cell reads	What happened
`#ERR Not connected`	No API key saved. Open the side panel and connect your account.
`#ERR Replace <name> with a cell or value`	A preview formula was copied as-is. Swap the placeholder for a cell reference.
`#ERR No "x" in websitetotext`	An option name this source does not take. The message lists the ones it does.
`#ERR No data point "…"`	The `"field"` path is not in the response. Check it against the table above.
`#PREMIUM(field)`	The field exists but your plan does not include it.
`#ERR Out of credits`	The cycle's credits are spent. Usage resets on your billing date.

Before the formula works

The add-in reads the API key you saved once in the side panel — the key never goes in the formula, so a shared sheet does not leak it and a collaborator without access simply sees the last calculated values.

Install the add-in for Google Sheets or Excel.
Open the side panel and sign in, or paste a key from your dashboard.
Type the formula above into any cell.

Use cases

LLM Pipeline Ingestion: Strip markup from linked articles and feed clean body copy directly into document chunking or vector embedding workflows.
News Monitoring Feeds: Media tracking platforms collect publication dates, publisher names, and article text from press releases across multiple news outlets.
Automated Translation Routing: Before translating external blog posts, read the detected language code and raw text to route content to the correct localization queue.
Archival Search Indexing: Internal search crawlers pull page titles, meta descriptions, and article text from saved URLs to populate full-text database indexes.

Other ways to use Website to Text

Set up Website to Text on VerveSheets, or reach the same source a different way. Your VerveSheets account and credits work on all of them — one key, one balance.

Call it as a REST APIOne HTTPS endpoint and an x-api-key header, with SDKs for Node, Python and .NET.APIVerve →Reference →

Give it to an AI agentConnect over MCP and your agent calls it as a native tool — Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT.VerveKit →Reference →