Site-Shot MCP server
Give Claude, Cursor, and other AI agents the ability to see any web page — take website screenshots
with Site-Shot over the Model Context Protocol.
Real Chromium rendering · full-page capture · country proxies · automatic ad & cookie-banner removal
(cleaner images, fewer vision tokens).
Quick start (Claude Desktop)
- Get a Site-Shot API key at https://www.site-shot.com/start/.
- Add this to your Claude Desktop config (
claude_desktop_config.json):
{
"mcpServers": {
"site-shot": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "site-shot-mcp"],
"env": { "SITESHOT_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY" }
}
}
}
- Restart Claude Desktop. Ask it to "take a full-page screenshot of https://news.ycombinator.com" and
it will call the server and show you the image.
Works the same way in any MCP client (Cursor, Cline, VS Code, LangChain, CrewAI) — point the client at
npx -y site-shot-mcp with SITESHOT_API_KEY in the environment.
capture_screenshot
Screenshot a web page (viewport by default).
| Param | Type | Default | Notes |
|---|
url | string (required) | — | Page to capture |
full_page | boolean | false | Capture the whole scrollable page |
width / height | number | API default | Viewport / device size |
format | "png" | "jpeg" | png | Image format |
block_ads | boolean | true | Remove ads |
block_cookie_banners | boolean | true | Remove cookie-consent popups |
country | string | — | Proxy country as a two-letter ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code, e.g. "DE" (auto IP/lang/tz/geo) |
strict_country | boolean | true | Error out if the country has no proxy, instead of falling back to the US |
language / time_zone / geolocation | string | — | Manual overrides |
wait_ms | number | API default | Extra wait before capture (SPAs/animations) |
max_height | number | 20000 (full page) | Cap captured height |
Returns the screenshot as an MCP image.
"API default" is not a number this package gets to state. width, height and wait_ms
are forwarded only when you pass them, so whatever applies when you don't is decided by the
Site-Shot API and can change without a release here. Versions up to 1.1.0 printed pixel sizes
for width / height that the API does not use — an agent that omitted them to take "the
default" got a different viewport, with nothing in the returned image to reveal it. Pass
explicit values whenever the size matters.
Country codes are ISO codes, never names. Pass "DE", not "Germany". The API matches
codes exactly and would otherwise render through a US proxy without telling you, so the server
rejects full names before spending a render. strict_country (on by default) likewise turns an
unavailable country into an error instead of a silent US screenshot — pass false to opt back
into the fallback. Supported countries →
capture_full_page
Same as capture_screenshot with full-page capture enabled.
Why call this server instead of the agent's own browser?
If your agent drives a browser, it can screenshot pages itself — and for pages that must be signed
into or stepped through a flow, that is the right tool. For public URLs, delegating the capture to
this server is usually better engineering: every capture runs the same pipeline (no re-planning
between runs), can be taken from a specific country with matching locale and time zone
(country + strict_country), is scored by an image classifier with an escalating retry ladder
behind it before being returned, and costs a fraction of a cent instead of a browser session plus
vision tokens per look. The full comparison, both directions honestly argued:
AI agent vs. screenshot API — who should capture the page.
Configuration
| Env var | Required | Description |
|---|
SITESHOT_API_KEY | yes | Your Site-Shot API key (used as userkey). |
The server is a thin wrapper over the existing Site-Shot HTTP API (https://api.site-shot.com/) — no
separate backend.
Local development
npm install
npm run check
npm run smoke
SITESHOT_API_KEY=yourkey npm start
Requirements
Node.js ≥ 18 (uses the built-in fetch).
License
MIT