Managing Robots

A robot is an AI-generated crawler compiled to Rust for a specific host and country combination. Robots understand a site's navigation, product pages, and data structure.

Popular ecommerce sites already have production crawlers. When you create a robot for a covered site, you get instant access with no build wait.

Creating a robot

Creating a robot starts with a robot build. You provide a URL from the target site and a country code. Extralt's AI analyzes the site and compiles a crawler.

• Dashboard

Navigate to Extract > Robots and open the New tab. Enter a product URL from the target site and select a country, then start the build.

• API

export EXTRALT_API_KEY="your-api-key"

curl -s -X POST "https://api.extralt.com/robot-builds" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $EXTRALT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example-store.com/products/sample",
    "country": "US"
  }' | jq

Build lifecycle

Robot builds go through these stages:

Status	Description
`pending`	Build is queued
`building`	AI is analyzing the site and generating the crawler
`completed`	Build succeeded, robot is ready
`failed`	Build could not complete

Builds typically take 3-5 minutes. The AI needs to load pages, understand the site structure, and generate extraction logic.

Monitoring builds

• Dashboard

Open the Builds tab under Extract > Robots to track build progress. When a build completes, the robot appears in the List tab ready to use.

Builds tab showing a completed and a building build

• API

Poll the build endpoint until it reaches a terminal status:

curl -s "https://api.extralt.com/robot-builds/$BUILD_ID" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $EXTRALT_API_KEY" | jq '.status'

• Dashboard

The List tab under Extract > Robots shows all your robots in a sortable table.

Robot list showing robots with host favicons, country flags, and action buttons

The table displays:

Column	Description
Name	Robot name (editable)
Host	The domain the robot crawls, shown with a favicon
Country	Country context for the extraction
Language	Language detected on the site
Created	When the robot was built

Actions available for each robot:

Start Run: jump directly to creating a new run with this robot.
Rename: change the robot's display name.
Delete: remove the robot permanently.

Robot details

Each robot is unique to a host + country combination:

Host: The domain the robot can crawl (e.g., example-store.com)
Country: The country context for the extraction (affects language, pricing, availability)

Robots are reusable. Once built, you can create multiple runs with the same robot.

Extralt continuously monitors extraction quality across its crawler library. When a site changes significantly, the platform detects the change and rebuilds the crawler automatically. You can also trigger a manual rebuild from the dashboard or API if needed.

Using robots with schedules

Once you have a robot, you can create runs manually or set up a schedule for recurring extractions on a cadence (hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly).

See Schedules to automate extractions.