Refinery MCP

Clean HTML before your agent burns tokens.

Refinery MCP wraps the Refinery Apify Actor as an MCP server so Claude, Cursor, and other agents can turn raw HTML or URLs into clean LLM-ready text plus word_count.

Agent pipeline: fetch, Refinery MCP, clean text, RAG

mermaid

flowchart LR
  A[Agent needs web context] --> B[Fetch URL or raw HTML]
  B --> C[Refinery MCP]
  C --> D[Refinery Apify Actor]
  D --> E[Clean text + word_count]
  E --> F[RAG / embeddings / LLM context]

The Problem

Agents are getting good at fetching web pages. The problem is what they fetch:

html

<html>
  <head>
    <script>gtag("event", "page_view")</script>
    <style>.nav,.cookie,.footer{display:block}</style>
  </head>
  <body>
    <nav>Home · Pricing · Login · Docs · Blog · Careers</nav>
    <aside>Subscribe to our newsletter</aside>
    <article>
      <h1>How ACME cut support ticket routing time by 63%</h1>
      <p>ACME routes 40,000 monthly support tickets through an AI triage system.</p>
      <p>The team reduced retrieval noise by cleaning HTML before chunking.</p>
    </article>
    <footer>Legal · Privacy · Cookie settings · LinkedIn · X</footer>
  </body>
</html>

The model does not need most of that. It needs this:

text

How ACME cut support ticket routing time by 63%

ACME routes 40,000 monthly support tickets through an AI triage system.
The team reduced retrieval noise by cleaning HTML before chunking.

Before and after: bloated HTML vs clean LLM-ready text and token savings

Refinery MCP gives your agent a tool for that middle step:

text

fetch page -> refine HTML -> send clean text to RAG / embeddings / LLM

Why

Agents can fetch pages, but raw HTML is noisy and expensive:

scripts, styles, tracking tags
nav, footers, cookie banners
repeated links and layout markup
huge token burn before the model sees the real content

Refinery is the middle step your agent can call before it stuffs web context into a prompt:

text

fetch/render -> clean/refine -> chunk/embed/answer

It is not a crawler. Use Firecrawl, Crawl4AI, Playwright, browser automation, or your own fetcher when you need rendering. Use Refinery when you already have a URL or raw HTML and want a cheap cleanup pass before the LLM.

When To Use It

Use Refinery MCP when:

your agent already fetched a page but got bloated HTML
you want a deterministic cleanup step before RAG ingestion
you need word_count / token-ish savings before embedding
you want to separate crawling from content cleanup

Do not use it as your browser renderer, anti-bot layer, or site crawler.

Tools

`clean_url`

Fetches a URL through the Refinery Apify Actor and returns dataset rows with clean text and metadata.

Example input:

config.json

{
  "url": "https://docs.stripe.com/payments",
  "removeScripts": true,
  "removeStyles": true
}

`clean_html`

Cleans raw HTML your agent, crawler, or browser session already fetched.

Example input:

config.json

{
  "html": "<html><body><nav>Home Pricing Login</nav><article><h1>Vendor security update</h1><p>We now support SOC 2 exports for enterprise accounts.</p></article><footer>Legal Privacy Careers</footer></body></html>",
  "extractMentions": false,
  "extractHashtags": false
}

Example result:

config.json

{
  "text": "Vendor security update\n\nWe now support SOC 2 exports for enterprise accounts.",
  "word_count": 10,
  "content_type": "web",
  "language": "en",
  "processing_time_ms": 44.96,
  "success": true
}

`estimate_savings`

Local helper that compares raw HTML vs cleaned text and estimates token savings. This does not call Apify.

Example output:

config.json

{
  "raw_chars": 168,
  "clean_chars": 41,
  "estimated_raw_tokens": 42,
  "estimated_clean_tokens": 11,
  "estimated_token_savings": 31,
  "reduction_pct": 76
}

Install

Terminal

npx -y @larelabs/refinery-mcp

Set your Apify token:

server.ts

export APIFY_TOKEN=apify_api_xxx
export REFINERY_ACTOR_ID=larelabs/refinery-html-to-llm-cleaner

Cursor / Claude Desktop config

Use the published package:

config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "refinery": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@larelabs/refinery-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "APIFY_TOKEN": "apify_api_xxx",
        "REFINERY_ACTOR_ID": "larelabs/refinery-html-to-llm-cleaner"
      }
    }
  }
}

Or run from source during development:

bash

git clone https://github.com/LareLabs/refinery-mcp
cd refinery-mcp
npm install
npm run build

config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "refinery": {
      "command": "npm",
      "args": ["run", "dev", "--prefix", "/absolute/path/to/refinery-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "APIFY_TOKEN": "apify_api_xxx"
      }
    }
  }
}

Smoke Test

Terminal

npm run build
APIFY_TOKEN=apify_api_xxx npm run smoke

The smoke test starts the MCP server over stdio, lists tools, and calls estimate_savings without spending Apify credits.

Example Agent Prompt

text

Use Refinery MCP to clean this docs page before summarizing it:
https://docs.stripe.com/payments

Return the clean text, word_count, and a short summary. Do not summarize raw HTML.

Another useful prompt:

text

I fetched this page HTML with Playwright. Use Refinery MCP clean_html before adding it to my RAG ingestion queue. Return the cleaned text and estimated token savings.

Roadmap

Glama listing (glama.json added — submit at https://glama.ai/mcp/servers)
mcp.so directory PR (pending)
Hosted HTTP/SSE MCP transport
Batch URL cleanup tool
Glama / PulseMCP / FindMCP / mcp.so listings
Optional direct REST wrapper for RapidAPI
Token savings benchmark page

License

MIT