Dust is able to crawl the content of a public website to make its content accessible from your data sources, meaning you can build agents based on this content.

Setting up the Connection

With an admin or builder role, you can set up new website connections on “Build” > “Websites”.

To fetch the pages of a website, Dust uses the links present inside the page provided in the URL field. It does not guess any pages but instead it “navigates” from reading the content inside the page provided and the pages linked (that are on the same domain).

And let’s say we have a website formed as is:

http://myfakewebsite.com

1. http://myfakewebsite.com/articles
   1. http://myfakewebsite.com/articles/article1
   2. http://myfakewebsite.com/articles/article2
2. http://myfakewebsite.com/jobs
   1. http://myfakewebsite.com/jobs/engineering
   2. http://myfakewebsite.com/jobs/design
3. http://myfakewebsite.com/product
4. http://myfakewebsite.com/about

Crawling strategy: All links vs children pages

If you’d like the whole website crawled, set the URL http://myfakewebsite.com with “Follow all links within the domain”.

If you’d like only the articles crawled, better set the URL http://myfakewebsite.com/articles with setting “Only child pages of the provided URL” to ensure the crawler fetches only the pages that contain http://myfakewebsite.com/articles in their URL.

Indexing a single page

If you want only the Engineering page indexed and no other page, you can set the url http://myfakewebsite.com/jobs/engineering combined with the setting “Page Limit” to 1.

Advanced setting: “Depth of Search”

This setting that allows you to say “How many links do I allow the crawler to follow to find a given page?”.

PDF

If your PDF are stored under the URL you are crawling, they will be included.

Google Docs

If you enter a Google Docs URL, it will be included. Note that if they're a link on a website, as they're good chance of them being on different domain, they're not going to be included.

Limitations

URL must be Public

If a login is required to access the website, Dust will not be able to access its content.

Blocked websites

Some websites are blocking crawling, here is a non exhaustive list:

• reddit.com
• linkedin.com
• instagram.com
• x.com
• tiktok.com