What is Tavily Map?

Last updated: May 5, 2025

Tavily Map is designed to give you a high-level overview of a website by discovering all the internal links starting from a base URL. It’s perfect when you want to visualize site structure, generate a sitemap, or plan a crawl or extraction job before processing full content.

🔍 What It Does

Tavily Map scans a website starting from a root URL and returns a list of internal pages it finds. Unlike Tavily Crawl, which extracts the full content of each page, Tavily Map only returns the discovered URLs, giving you a quick look at what’s available to crawl or extract.

This is useful for:

Previewing which pages exist under a domain
Filtering links by category or path
Planning extraction jobs
Creating sitemaps for documentation sites, blogs, or product portals

📥 How to Use Tavily Map

Make a POST request to:

https://api.tavily.com/map

🔐 Authentication

Use your Tavily API key in the Authorization header:

Authorization: Bearer tvly-YOUR_API_KEY

🧾 Request Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
`url`	string	Required. The root URL to begin the mapping (e.g., `"https://docs.tavily.com"`).
`max_depth`	integer	Optional. How many link levels deep to explore (default: 1).
`max_breadth`	integer	Optional. Maximum number of links to follow per page (default: 20).
`limit`	integer	Optional. Maximum number of total links to return (default: 50).
`query`	string	Optional. A natural language query to guide the crawl (e.g., `"Python SDK"`).
`select_paths`	array of regex strings	Optional. Only include URLs matching specific paths (e.g., `"/docs/.*"`).
`select_domains`	array of regex strings	Optional. Restrict mapping to specific domains or subdomains.
`allow_external`	boolean	Optional. Whether to follow links to external domains (default: `false`).
`categories`	enum	Optional. Filter by category: `Documentation`, `Blog`, `Careers`, `Pricing`, etc.

✅ Example Response

{"base_url": "docs.tavily.com",

"results": [ "https://docs.tavily.com/welcome", "https://docs.tavily.com/documentation/api-credits", "https://docs.tavily.com/documentation/about"],

"response_time": 1.23}

🧠 When to Use Tavily Map vs. Tavily Crawl

	Tavily Map	Tavily Crawl
Purpose	Discover links	Extract page content
Response	List of URLs	Page content + metadata
Use Case	Sitemap, planning	Ingestion, RAG apps
Performance	Faster	More resource-intensive