Venice Augment (text parse / scrape / search)

Three lightweight helpers for agent pipelines that need document text, web pages, or search results without running your own parser, crawler, or search account. All three are marked experimental in the docs — request/response shapes may change.

| Endpoint | Input | Output | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| POST /augment/text-parser | multipart/form-data file (≤ 25 MB) | { text, tokens } JSON, or text/plain | $0.01 / successful call |
| POST /augment/scrape | { url } | { url, content, format: "markdown" } | $0.01 / successful call |
| POST /augment/search | { query, limit?, search_provider? } | { query, results: [{ title, url, content, date }] } | $0.01 / successful call |

All three accept a Bearer API key or an x402 wallet (SIGN-IN-WITH-X header) — see venice-auth. The balance is checked before the work runs; the charge is applied only after a 200 response. (The OpenAPI x-payment-info advertises a generic dynamic range of $0.001–$10.00; the actual price sheet charge is $0.01.)

POST /augment/text-parser — extract text from documents

Request

Always multipart/form-data:

| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| file | Required. Max 25 MB (larger → 413). |
| response_format | json (default) or text. |

Accepted file types (matched by MIME type, or by filename extension when the MIME type isn't recognized, e.g. application/octet-stream):

• Structured documents: PDF, EPUB, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, XLS. Legacy .doc and .ppt are not accepted.
• Text / data: any text/* MIME, plus Markdown, CSV/TSV, JSON/JSONL, YAML, TOML, XML, HTML, RTF, LaTeX, logs, etc.
• Source code: .py, .ts, .js, .go, .rs, .c, .cpp, .java, .sh, .ps1, .sql, … plus extensionless Dockerfile / Makefile (~140 text/data/code extensions are recognized in total).

Anything else → 400 Unsupported file type.

curl -X POST https://api.venice.ai/api/v1/augment/text-parser \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VENICE_API_KEY" \
  -F "file=@./contract.pdf" \
  -F "response_format=json"

Response

response_format=json:

{
  "text": "…extracted text…",
  "tokens": 3821
}

response_format=text — the raw extracted text as the body (Content-Type: text/plain).

Tips

• DOCX, PPTX, XLSX/XLS and EPUB come back as markdown (spreadsheets as markdown tables). PDFs and text files come back as plain text.
• tokens is a character-based estimate (ceil(chars / 3.2)), not a model tokenizer count — use it for rough budgeting of a downstream chat request.
• Scanned/image-only PDFs are not OCR'd; if nothing can be extracted you get 400 "No text content could be extracted from the file." Run page images through a vision model via /chat/completions instead.
• Password-protected PDFs → 400 "The PDF file is password-protected…"; empty/corrupt PDFs → 400 "The PDF file is empty or invalid."
• Documents are processed in memory and content is not retained after the response. (Operational metadata such as request IDs and error traces may still be logged — this is a no-content-retention guarantee, not a zero-log guarantee.)

POST /augment/scrape — URL → markdown

Request

{ "url": "https://example.com/article" }

url must be a valid absolute http:// or https:// URL.

curl -X POST https://api.venice.ai/api/v1/augment/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VENICE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com"}'

Response

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "content": "# Example Domain\n\nThis domain is for use in …",
  "format": "markdown"
}

How it fetches

Sites that serve markdown directly are returned as-is; otherwise the page is fetched and converted to markdown. Redirects are followed, but a redirect to a private/internal target fails the request (see below). The X/Reddit blocklist is checked against the URL you send, not against redirect targets.

Tips

• Blocked sites — x.com, twitter.com (incl. www. / mobile.) and reddit.com (incl. www. / old. / new.) are rejected immediately with 400. Use enable_x_search or enable_web_search on /chat/completions for those — see venice-chat.
• Blocked URLs — non-HTTP(S) schemes, URLs with embedded credentials, localhost / private / reserved IPs and cloud-metadata hosts return 400. A public hostname that resolves or redirects to such a target fails with 500.
• Unreachable hosts, timeouts and pages with no extractable content return 500 with a message (e.g. "URL unreachable: …"). You are not charged.
• Some sites return a partial body. Check content length before piping it into a model.
• Rate limit: 20 requests/minute per user (429 beyond that). The counter runs before URL validation, so rejected URLs also count.

POST /augment/search — web search

Request

| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| query | Required. 1–400 chars. Longer is rejected (400), not truncated. |
| limit | Integer 1–20. Default 10. See the cap below. |
| search_provider | "brave" (default) or "google". |

curl -X POST https://api.venice.ai/api/v1/augment/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VENICE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "venice ai api pricing",
    "limit": 5,
    "search_provider": "brave"
  }'

Response

{
  "query": "venice ai api pricing",
  "results": [
    {
      "title": "Pricing — Venice.ai",
      "url": "https://venice.ai/pricing",
      "content": "Venice offers per-token pricing …",
      "date": "2026-04-10"
    }
  ]
}

• date is whatever the provider reports and may be an empty string; don't assume a fixed format.
• Results without a snippet are dropped, so you can get fewer than limit. A search with no hits returns 200 with results: [] (still charged).

Providers

| Provider | Retention | Results | content |
|---|---|---|---|
| brave (default) | Zero Data Retention — queries are not stored or logged by the provider. | At most 10 | Snippet plus any extra snippets. |
| google | Anonymized — proxied through Venice so your identity isn't attached to the query; Venice doesn't store or log queries. | At most 5 | Extracted page summary/markdown (longer), truncated to a budget. |

limit accepts up to 20, but the upstream request is fixed at 10 results for brave and 5 for google, so values above those caps have no effect.

Tips

• For cited answers inside a chat completion, use /chat/completions with venice_parameters.enable_web_search + enable_web_citations instead. See venice-chat.
• For "search + read" pipelines, feed results[*].url into /augment/scrape — mind the 20/min scrape limit.
• Rate limit: 20 requests/minute per user (429 beyond that). Requests that fail body validation still count.

Errors

| Status | Cause |
|---|---|
| 400 | Missing file, unsupported file type, no extractable text, password-protected/invalid PDF; invalid/blocked URL (X, Reddit, private/internal); empty or > 400-char query; limit out of range; non-JSON Content-Type on scrape/search ("'Content-Type' must be 'application/json'"). Body: { error }, or { error: "Invalid request parameters", details, issues } on schema failures. |
| 401 | Invalid API key or SIWX signature. |
| 402 | Insufficient balance or the key's USD/DIEM spend limit reached. Bearer → "Insufficient USD or Diem balance…"; x402 → payment-required body + PAYMENT-REQUIRED header. Requests with no credentials at all also get 402 (x402 discovery challenge). |
| 403 | API access disabled for the account ("API access has been disabled for this account…"). |
| 413 | Text-parser file over 25 MB (PAYLOAD_TOO_LARGE). |
| 429 | Per-endpoint rate limit (scrape/search: 20/min) or the failed-request limiter. Back off with jitter. |
| 500 | Scrape fetch failure, search provider failure ("Search provider failed to return results…"), or parse failure ("Failed to parse document"). Not charged; safe to retry. |

See venice-errors for body shapes and retry strategy.

Response headers

• X-Balance-Remaining — listed in the spec for x402 callers but not currently set by the server; poll GET /x402/balance/{walletAddress} instead.
• x-ratelimit-limit-requests / x-ratelimit-remaining-requests / x-ratelimit-reset-requests — scrape and search.
• Content-Encoding — when you send Accept-Encoding: gzip, br.

Patterns

• Document QA — upload a PDF to /augment/text-parser, put text into a /chat/completions message, ask questions.
• Research agent — /augment/search → /augment/scrape on the top URLs → /chat/completions with the markdown bodies.
• Data extraction — XLSX via text-parser yields markdown tables you can pipe to a model with response_format: { type: "json_schema", ... }.
• Code review — send source files directly to text-parser (no need to convert to PDF) and feed the text to a coding model.