Crawl a website starting from a URL. Follows internal links up to specified depth. Returns markdown for each page.
AI agents call crawl to retrieve information from Mcp Services without modifying anything — typically the context-gathering step in research, monitoring, and reporting workflows, before the agent takes action elsewhere.
This is primarily a Read operation—it fetches and extracts web content without side effects. However, severity is elevated to 'medium' rather than 'low' because: (1) recursive crawling with specified depth could cause excessive requests leading to denial-of-service impact on target servers, (2) crawling may harvest sensitive data or private content if access controls are misconfigured, and (3) the tool could be…
From the tool's definition Tool 'crawl' retrieves and returns markdown content from websites by following links. Core verbs: 'crawl', 'follows', 'returns' indicate data retrieval with no modification or deletion of target systems.
Attacks that exploit this kind of access
Crawl a website starting from a URL. Follows internal links up to specified depth. Returns markdown for each page. It is categorised as a Read tool in the Mcp Services MCP Server, which means it retrieves data without modifying state.
Register the Mcp Services MCP server in PolicyLayer and add a rule for crawl: allow, deny, rate-limit, or require approval. Point your MCP client at the PolicyLayer proxy URL and the rule is enforced on every call, before it reaches Mcp Services. Nothing to install.
crawl is a Read tool with low risk. Read-only tools are generally safe to allow by default.
Yes. Add a rate_limit block to the crawl rule in your PolicyLayer policy. For example, setting max: 10 and window: 60 limits the tool to 10 calls per minute. Rate limits are tracked per agent session and reset automatically.
Set action: deny in the PolicyLayer policy for crawl. The AI agent will receive a policy violation error and cannot call the tool. You can also include a reason field to explain why the tool is blocked.
crawl is provided by the Mcp Services MCP server (san-npm/mcp-services). PolicyLayer sits as a proxy in front of this server to enforce policies before tool calls reach the server.
Every MCP server has a record like this.
Type a name, get the same breakdown: verified identity, auth posture, risk grade, capabilities, recommended policy.
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