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Web Browsing

Some work doesn’t have an API — it lives behind a login, in a portal, on a page with a download button. Erdo agents can drive a real web browser to do that work: open a site, sign in, click through a flow, read what’s on the page, download a file, or take a screenshot — then bring the results back into your thread.

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When a website read returns no content

For a simple website read, an empty or whitespace-only response is reported as a failure, even if it includes a page title, description, image list, or links. Those details do not establish that the page’s content was read. The failure identifies the URL and any returned title or description so you can check the page, choose another source, or request an interactive browser task when needed. An empty response alone does not establish an HTTP status or why extraction failed. It does not trigger another fetch automatically.

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What you can do

• Get something from behind a login — “Log into our ad portal and download this month’s spend report.”
• Do a multi-step task on a site — “Go to this supplier’s site, find the SKU, and tell me the lead time and price.”
• Pull data off a page that has no API — “Read the pricing table on this page and turn it into a dataset.”
• Capture a page — “Take a full-page screenshot of this dashboard.”

The agent narrates what it’s doing, and you can watch the live browser as it works. When the browser finishes — or reaches its time limit — the session closes and the live view ends; the results stay in the thread.

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What comes back

Whatever the agent produces in the browser comes back as part of the result:

• Files — anything the agent downloads or exports (a CSV, a PDF, a report) is saved to your Erdo storage and returned as a download link, not a throwaway URL.
• Screenshots — images the agent captures are saved and returned the same way.
• Extracted content — text, tables, and observations the agent read off the page, ready to use in the rest of the thread (e.g. turned into a dataset).

Because files are re-hosted into Erdo, the links keep working after the task finishes — you can open them later or feed a downloaded file straight into a dataset.

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Signing in safely

When a task needs to log in, the agent uses your saved credentials for that site:

• Credentials are stored encrypted and are scoped to the specific site.
• The agent’s reasoning never sees the actual values — they’re injected straight into the login form by the browser, not read by the model.
• Like connectors, credentials are per user — the agent acts as you, with your access, and only on the sites you’ve set up.

If a login needs a one-time email code, an agent can read it from an inbox you’ve given it — so a verification step doesn’t dead-end the task.

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How it fits with the rest of Erdo

• Prefer a connector when one exists — connected tools sync into queryable datasets, which is faster and more reliable than driving a browser.
• Use web browsing for the gaps: sites with no API, one-off portal tasks, and anything that genuinely needs a person-like browser session.
• A file a task downloads can become a dataset, and a page it reads can become knowledge — the browser is a way in, and the rest of Erdo takes it from there.