Allrecipes Recipe Search

Purpose

Search Allrecipes for recipes matching a query (keyword, ingredient list, category browse, or direct recipe URL) and return structured JSON — per-recipe identifier, title, author + profile URL, hero image + gallery images, star rating + count, prep/cook/total time (ISO 8601 + minutes), servings, calories, full ingredient list, step-by-step instructions, full nutrition facts, category/cuisine/dietary tags, "Made it" count, and the canonical recipe URL. Read-only — never clicks Save, Add to Meal Plan, Print, Rate, Comment, or Sign In.

When to Use

• "Find me chocolate-chip cookie recipes ranked best-first."
• "Give me five 30-minute vegan dinners using soy sauce."
• "Extract the recipe at allrecipes.com/recipe/10813/... into structured form."
• "Bulk-collect Italian dinner recipes from /recipes/86/world-cuisine/european/italian/."
• Building meal planners, ingredient-aware search, recipe databases, or dietary-filter UIs on top of Allrecipes' content.

Workflow

The optimal path is HTTP-only via browse cloud fetch (the Browserbase Fetch API). Allrecipes is lightly walled — every probe in this skill's development (8 search-page fetches and 6 recipe-detail fetches across 3 query shapes) returned 200 with full SSR HTML. No proxies, no --verified Verified, no session, no auth, no cookies are required. Recipe detail pages ship one schema.org application/ld+json Recipe block containing every field you need; search results pages are server-rendered HTML cards (no __NEXT_DATA__, no XHR).

1. Branch on the input shape

2. Fetch the search results page

browse cloud fetch "https://www.allrecipes.com/search?q=chocolate+chip+cookies" \
  --output /tmp/page-0.html
# For pages 2, 3, …: append &offset=24, &offset=48, &offset=72, …

No flags required for the first attempt (no --proxies, no --allow-redirects). Add --allow-redirects only when fetching old /recipe/<id>/<old-slug>/ URLs that have been renamed (see gotchas).

3. Parse search-result cards from SSR HTML

Each card is one <a> anchor with class mntl-card-list-card. Iterate them with:

<a[^>]*mntl-card-list-card[^>]*href="(https://www\.allrecipes\.com/recipe/(\d+)/[^"]+)"(.*?)</a>

Per-card fields (all stable across queries; verified on chocolate chip cookies and vegan lasagna):

After parsing, emit cards from page 1, then continue to step 4 if the caller wants full recipe details, OR continue with step 5 to enumerate more pages.

4. Fetch + parse a single recipe detail page

browse cloud fetch "https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/10813/best-chocolate-chip-cookies/" \
  --allow-redirects \
  --output /tmp/recipe.html

Extract the LD+JSON block:

blocks = re.findall(r'<script[^>]*application/ld\+json[^>]*>(.*?)</script>', html, re.DOTALL)
data = json.loads(blocks[0])
if isinstance(data, list): data = data[0]   # rare: top-level is a list

The @type is ["Recipe", "NewsArticle"] (or just ["Recipe"] for older entries). All the rich fields are at the top level of this single object:

Three fields that are NOT in LD+JSON — scrape from raw HTML:

# Author profile URL (the LD+JSON has the name only, not the URL)
author_url_match = re.search(
    r'mntl-attribution__item-name[^>]*>([^<]+)</[^>]+>.*?href="(https?://[^"]*/cook/[^"]+)"',
    html, re.DOTALL
)
author_profile_url = author_url_match.group(2) if author_url_match else None

# "Made it" count (community engagement metric)
made_it = re.search(r'data-made-it-count[^>]*>\s*([0-9,]+)', html)
made_it_count = int(made_it.group(1).replace(',', '')) if made_it else None

# Internal CMS doc_id (also visible on search cards as data-doc-id)
doc_id = re.search(r'data-doc-id="(\d+)"', html)

5. Pagination

GET /search?q=<query>&offset=0    → up to 24 cards (page 1)
GET /search?q=<query>&offset=24   → up to 24 cards (page 2)
GET /search?q=<query>&offset=48   → page 3, …

Stop conditions (apply in order):

1. Caller-imposed limit — once you've accumulated limit cards, stop.
2. Empty no-results header — if .mntl-search-results__no-results-header is present with text "0 results found for your search.", the entire query has no matches.
3. Card count < 24 on a page — that's the de facto last page. The pagination footer is misleading (see gotcha) and you must NOT continue paginating past this point.
4. Hard ceiling — Allrecipes' search index appears to top out around ~120 results for most queries (5 pages × 24). Cap at offset=200 as a safety stop.

6. Apply client-side filters (because the server has none)

After steps 3 and 4, post-filter the result set to honor caller-specified dimensions that Allrecipes does NOT support server-side:

• Time — filter by times.total_iso parsed to minutes (PT30M → 30). Categories: "Under 15 min" → ≤15; "Under 30 min" → ≤30; "Under 1 hour" → ≤60; "1+ hours" → ≥60.
• Rating — filter by rating.value. "4+" → ≥4.0; "4.5+" → ≥4.5; "5" → ≥4.95.
• Dietary — match against categories, cuisines, and keywords (e.g. "vegan", "gluten-free"). Note: Allrecipes' dietary tagging is inconsistent — the most reliable signal is whether the query itself contained the dietary word ("vegan lasagna" yielded recipes whose categories=['Dinner'] and cuisines=['Italian Inspired'] without an explicit "Vegan" tag).
• Must-include / must-exclude ingredients — substring match against ingredients[] (raw strings, lowercased).
• Occasion / difficulty — not surfaced on Allrecipes at all; the skill cannot honor these dimensions and should explicitly say so in its response.

Always report in the output which filters were applied server-side (none, basically) vs. applied client-side so the caller knows the provenance.

7. Sort

Allrecipes search has no sort parameter (verified — see gotcha). The default ranking is the server's own (it surfaces 10813/best-chocolate-chip-cookies as result #1 across multiple unrelated query variants, suggesting curated boosting). To honor a caller-specified sort, sort client-side after extracting LD+JSON ratings/times for each card:

• Most Popular (default) → use server order as-is.
• Highest Rated → sort by rating.value desc, tie-break by rating.count desc.
• Most Reviewed → sort by rating.count desc.
• Newest → sort by date_published desc.
• Quickest → sort by times.total_iso (parsed to minutes) asc.

Document that client-side sort requires fetching the LD+JSON detail page for each card (one extra HTTP request per card) — a non-trivial cost beyond ~10 cards.

Site-Specific Gotchas

• The /search form takes only q. Sort, dietary, cuisine, meal-type, time, and rating filters that the prompt's intent suggests are simply not URL-parameterized. Verified: &sort=rating, &sort=newest, &minrating=4 all returned the same first 3 recipe IDs (10813, 26237, 9827) as the unfiltered baseline — unrecognized params are silently dropped. Don't waste turns probing for hidden filter params.
• There is no "X recipes found" count on the search page. The pagination footer always shows up to 4 numbered page links (offsets 0/24/48/72) and a "Next" link — neither reflects the true total. To know how many results exist, you must page-walk until either (a) .mntl-search-results__no-results-header appears, or (b) a page returns < 24 cards.
• Pagination past the actual results returns garbage, not "no results". Verified on vegan lasagna: page 1 (offset=0) returned 5 cards; page 2 (offset=24) returned 0 cards but no no-results header; page 3 (offset=48) returned 1 unrelated card (a Caesar salad recipe). The pagination footer for the same query advertised offsets [0, 24, 48, 72] — completely misleading. Trust card-count-per-page < 24 as your stop signal, not the pagination footer and not the no-results selector.
• The no-results header only fires for "0 results, period". A query like xyzqwertyzz returns <h2 class="mntl-search-results__no-results-header">0 results found for your search.</h2>. But page-2-past-the-end of a small successful search returns an empty .mntl-search-results__list with no no-results header. Detect end-of-results by card count, not by the no-results header for incremental pagination.
• Honest filter mapping (because the server has none): meal-type/category → use the taxonomy hub URL /recipes/<id>/<slug>/ (e.g. /recipes/79/desserts/, /recipes/78/breakfast-and-brunch/); cuisine → /recipes/86/world-cuisine/<slug>/; healthy/dietary → /recipes/84/healthy-recipes/ subtree. Taxonomy hubs are curated mixed pages (subcategory tiles + featured recipe cards) — they do not support ?sort= or filter chips either; they are static-content hubs, not faceted search.
• browse cloud fetch returns binary as base64. When fetching recipe images (/thmb/...jpg), the returned bytes are a base64-encoded string, not raw JPEG. Decode with base64.b64decode(...) before saving with the .jpg extension. The magic bytes 2f396a2f (/9j/ ASCII) tell you it's base64 JPEG; after decode you'll see ffd8ffe0 (real JPEG SOI). Same applies to --output files for any binary content type.
• --allow-redirects is required for old recipe URLs. Without it, fetching a renamed recipe URL returns a 0-byte body with statusCode: 301. Pass --allow-redirects on every recipe-detail fetch as a precaution. (The search pages themselves only emit current URLs, so paginating fetches don't need this flag — but caller-provided direct URLs might.)
• recipe_id (URL slug) vs data-doc-id are different identifiers. The canonical recipe ID is the integer in /recipe/<N>/ (e.g. 10813). data-doc-id (e.g. 6649624) is the internal CMS document ID and surfaces on both search cards and recipe detail pages, but it does not appear in any URL the public uses. Always use the URL-slug ID as the primary key; surface doc_id only as a secondary identifier.
• The per-card star-rating SVG is hard to parse precisely. Each card contains a mix of icon-star (filled), icon-star-half, and (implicitly) empty stars rendered via background. A regex like icon-star\s ALSO matches icon-star-half. To get the precise decimal rating, fetch the recipe detail page's LD+JSON aggregateRating.ratingValue (string-typed). Don't expose card-level star math as the authoritative rating.
• recipeYield is always an array. E.g. ["48", "4 dozen cookies"] — the first element is the numeric servings count, the second is a human-readable label. Don't trust positional ordering for older recipes; the numeric form may not always be index 0. Match by isdigit() or regex.
• Time fields are ISO 8601 PT format. PT30M = 30 min, PT1H30M = 90 min, PT3M33S (video duration) = 3 min 33 sec. totalTime may be absent or null for recipes with overnight resting/marinating; fall back to prepTime + cookTime summed in that case.
• Nutrition values are unit-suffixed strings, not numbers. "146 kcal", "19 g", "76 mg". Parse with a regex like ^([0-9.]+)\s*([a-zA-Z]+)$ if you need numerics.
• Author profile URL is not in LD+JSON — only the name is. Scrape from .mntl-attribution__item-name near the headline. The URL pattern is /cook/<author-id>/.
• "Made it" count is not in LD+JSON — scrape from data-made-it-count attribute on .mm-recipes-made-it__count. Stripped of commas: "40,219" → 40219.
• Search-card thumbnails are 282×188 webp; recipe-page hero is up to 1500×0 JPEG. If the caller wants high-res imagery, fetch the recipe detail page and use image.url from LD+JSON; the search card's data-src is intentionally a lazy-load thumbnail.
• No auth, no anti-bot, no rate-limit observed. All 14 fetches across the iteration loop returned 200 with no captcha, no Akamai, no Cloudflare challenge. Do not escalate to --verified, --proxies, or a Verified session unless you actually see a 403 — these add latency and cost for no gain on this site today.
• Region matters for taxonomy URLs. /recipes/86/world-cuisine/italian/ exists; /recipes/86/world-cuisine/cajun/ exists; but Allrecipes' cuisine taxonomy is US-centric and some niche cuisines may not have hub pages. When in doubt, fall back to /search?q=<cuisine>+<dish> and post-filter the LD+JSON recipeCuisine field.

Expected Output

Five distinct outcome shapes. Always include the filters_honored_server_side: [] and filters_applied_client_side: [...] fields so callers can see what the server did vs. what you did.

1. Multi-result search (the typical case)

{
  "outcome": "multi_result_search",
  "query": "chocolate chip cookies",
  "source_url": "https://www.allrecipes.com/search?q=chocolate+chip+cookies",
  "page_size": 24,
  "pages_fetched": 1,
  "total_results_estimated": 24,
  "filters_honored_server_side": [],
  "filters_applied_client_side": [
    {"dimension": "min_rating", "value": 4.0, "matched": 18, "filtered_out": 6}
  ],
  "sort_applied_client_side": {"by": "rating.value", "order": "desc"},
  "results": [
    {
      "recipe_id": "10813",
      "doc_id": "6649624",
      "url": "https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/10813/best-chocolate-chip-cookies/",
      "title": "Best Chocolate Chip Cookies",
      "thumbnail": "https://www.allrecipes.com/thmb/ftTl3UM20In5I3dxLfqrcZqHq5A=/282x188/.../10813-best-chocolate-chip-cookies-mfs-step-7-148-52cdaefcd6e04707863288ded8451075.jpg",
      "rating": {"value": 4.6, "count": 19427},
      "category_tag": "Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipes",
      "detail_fetched": false
    }
  ]
}

2. Multi-result with full detail expansion (one LD+JSON fetch per card)

{
  "outcome": "multi_result_search",
  "query": "chocolate chip cookies",
  "results": [
    {
      "recipe_id": "10813",
      "doc_id": "6649624",
      "url": "https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/10813/best-chocolate-chip-cookies/",
      "title": "Best Chocolate Chip Cookies",
      "description": "This classic chocolate chip cookie recipe makes deliciously buttery cookies…",
      "author": {"name": "Dora", "profile_url": "https://www.allrecipes.com/cook/28183721/"},
      "primary_image": "https://www.allrecipes.com/thmb/8xwaWAHtl_QLij6D-G0Z4B1HDVA=/1500x0/.../10813-best-chocolate-chip-cookies-mfs-146-4x3-b108aceffa6043a1ac81c3c5a9b034c8.jpg",
      "additional_images": ["https://www.allrecipes.com/thmb/ikAh8YlzsTfWmVA6G6MRHlq7xtU=/1500x0/...step-01.jpg", "…"],
      "video": {"url": "https://content.jwplatform.com/videos/qHQSNVCK-K3AjnAEN.mp4", "thumbnail": "https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/qHQSNVCK/thumbnails/tibAvzY8.jpg?width=1280", "duration_iso": "PT3M33S"},
      "rating": {"value": 4.6, "count": 19427},
      "made_it_count": 40219,
      "times": {"prep_iso": "PT20M", "cook_iso": "PT10M", "total_iso": "PT30M", "total_minutes": 30},
      "servings": {"yield": 48, "label": "4 dozen cookies"},
      "ingredients": [
        "1 cup butter, softened",
        "1 cup white sugar",
        "1 cup packed brown sugar",
        "2 eggs",
        "2 teaspoons vanilla extract",
        "1 teaspoon baking soda",
        "2 teaspoons hot water",
        "0.5 teaspoon salt",
        "3 cups all-purpose flour",
        "2 cups semisweet chocolate chips",
        "1 cup chopped walnuts"
      ],
      "instructions": [
        "Gather your ingredients, making sure your butter is softened, and your eggs are room temperature.",
        "Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Beat butter, white sugar, and brown sugar together in a large bowl with an electric mixer until smooth and creamy.",
        "Beat in eggs, one at a time, then stir in vanilla."
      ],
      "nutrition": {
        "calories": "146 kcal",
        "fat": "8 g",
        "saturated_fat": "4 g",
        "cholesterol": "10 mg",
        "carbs": "19 g",
        "fiber": "1 g",
        "sugar": null,
        "protein": "2 g",
        "sodium": "76 mg"
      },
      "categories": ["Dessert"],
      "cuisines": ["American"],
      "keywords": ["publisher-tested"],
      "date_published": "1998-04-18T16:10:32-04:00",
      "date_modified": "2026-03-23T19:52:45-04:00",
      "detail_fetched": true
    }
  ]
}

3. Zero-result search

{
  "outcome": "no_results",
  "query": "xyzqwertyzz",
  "source_url": "https://www.allrecipes.com/search?q=xyzqwertyzz",
  "detection_selector": ".mntl-search-results__no-results-header",
  "site_message": "0 results found for your search.",
  "results": []
}

4. Direct recipe URL → single recipe extracted

{
  "outcome": "single_recipe",
  "source_url": "https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/10813/best-chocolate-chip-cookies/",
  "recipe": { /* same shape as `results[i]` in outcome #2 above */ }
}

5. Category-browse intent → taxonomy hub

{
  "outcome": "category_hub",
  "query": "Desserts",
  "resolved_url": "https://www.allrecipes.com/recipes/79/desserts/",
  "subcategories": [
    {"name": "Chocolate", "url": "https://www.allrecipes.com/recipes/1557/desserts/chocolate/"},
    {"name": "Cakes",     "url": "https://www.allrecipes.com/recipes/276/desserts/cakes/"},
    {"name": "Cobblers",  "url": "https://www.allrecipes.com/recipes/361/desserts/cobbler/"}
  ],
  "featured_recipes": [
    { /* card-shaped objects as in outcome #1 */ }
  ],
  "note": "Taxonomy hubs are curated mixed pages — they do not support sort or filter chips. Use them as entry points, then narrow with /search?q= for fine-grained matches."
}