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Map vs Crawl: scope a site without burning credits

Two endpoints, two jobs. Map discovers URLs for 1 credit; Crawl reads them. Here's how to combine them.

The Synoppy team
Jun 12, 2026 · 4 min read

Two endpoints people mix up — Map and Crawl. They sound similar but do different jobs, and picking the right one is the difference between a 1-credit call and a few hundred.

Map — discover URLs (1 credit)

Mapanswers “what pages exist here?” without reading any of them. It parses sitemap.xml, and falls back to extracting same-origin links when a site has no sitemap. You get back the URL list, a total count, and which source was used — all for a single credit.

bash
curl -X POST https://synoppy.com/api/map \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SYNOPPY_KEY" \
  -d '{ "url": "https://example.com" }'
# → { "urls": [...], "count": 1204, "source": "sitemap" }

Crawl — read every page (2 credits / page)

Crawlanswers “give me the content of this site.” It discovers URLs and then reads each one through the same Read engine, returning one clean Markdown document per page. It's bounded by a limit you set (1–25 per call) and bills 2 credits for each page it actually reads.

bash
curl -X POST https://synoppy.com/api/crawl \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SYNOPPY_KEY" \
  -d '{ "url": "https://example.com", "limit": 10 }'
# → { "discovered": 1204, "count": 10, "pages": [...] }

Combine them

The pattern that scales: Map first to see how big a site is and scope a targeted subset, then Crawl only the URLs you care about. Mapping a 1,204-page docs site costs 1 credit; blindly crawling it would cost thousands. Discovery is cheap on purpose — use it to spend your crawl budget where it counts.

Rule of thumb: reach for Map when you need links (sitemaps, audits, scoping), and Crawl when you need content (ingestion, RAG). Everything draws from one pooled credit balance.

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