How to scrape meta tag content using Puppeteer in Node.js

Other Questions Puppeteer
1

I’m working with Puppeteer for web scraping and need help extracting meta tag information. I can successfully grab page titles and paragraph text, but I’m struggling to get the content from meta tags.

Specifically, I want to extract the content attribute from meta tags like this one:
<meta name="description" content="Some website description here">

Here’s my current working code that gets titles and text successfully:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

async function scrapeData() {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({headless: true});
  const webpage = await browser.newPage();
  await webpage.goto('https://example.com/', {waitUntil: 'domcontentloaded'});

  const siteTitle = await webpage.evaluate(() => document.querySelector('title').textContent);
  const alternateTitle = await webpage.title();
  const paragraphContent = await webpage.evaluate(() => document.querySelector('p').innerText);
  
  console.log(siteTitle);
  console.log(alternateTitle);
  console.log(paragraphContent);
}

scrapeData();

What’s the correct way to target and extract the content from meta description tags? Any help would be appreciated.

2

you can grab meta content with await webpage.evaluate(() => document.querySelector('meta[name="description"]').getAttribute('content')) - just add this after ur existing code and ur good to go. just make sure that meta tag exists first or ur gonna get an error.

3

Building on what others said - I hit the same problem scraping multiple meta tags. Way more efficient to grab them all in one evaluate call instead of separate DOM queries. Here’s what works for me:

const metaData = await webpage.evaluate(() => {
  const description = document.querySelector('meta[name="description"]')?.getAttribute('content');
  const keywords = document.querySelector('meta[name="keywords"]')?.getAttribute('content');
  const ogTitle = document.querySelector('meta[property="og:title"]')?.getAttribute('content');
  return { description, keywords, ogTitle };
});

This cuts down context switches between Node and browser, which speeds things up when you’re scraping tons of pages. Just watch out - some sites use property instead of name for certain meta tags.

4

You need getAttribute('content') instead of textContent for meta tags since the content lives in an attribute, not as text. Here’s what to add to your code:

const metaDescription = await webpage.evaluate(() => {
  const metaTag = document.querySelector('meta[name="description"]');
  return metaTag ? metaTag.getAttribute('content') : null;
});

The null check prevents errors when the meta tag doesn’t exist. You can grab other meta tags by switching the selector - meta[property="og:title"] for Open Graph titles or meta[name="keywords"] for keywords. Works for any meta tag attribute.