PixelRAG

Official codebase for PIXELRAG: Web Screenshots Beat Text for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Yichuan Wang*, Zhifei Li*, Zirui Wang, Paul Teiletche, Lesheng Jin
Matei Zaharia†, Joseph E. Gonzalez†, Sewon Min†

_{* Equal contribution   † Equal advising
Work done at Berkeley SkyLab & BAIR & Berkeley NLP}

Search any document by how it looks, not just the text it contains.

What it is · Give Claude eyes · How it works · Pipelines

---

pip install pixelrag

The two core operations — render a page to screenshots, search a visual index:

# Render any page or document to screenshot tiles
pixelshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python --output ./tiles

# Search a hosted index of 8.28M Wikipedia pages — no setup, runs against the live API
curl -X POST https://api.pixelrag.ai/search \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"queries": [{"text": "What is the capital of France?"}], "n_docs": 5}'

Live, hosted endpoint — https://api.pixelrag.ai serves a pre-built index of 8.28M Wikipedia pages. No setup, no API key. It even takes an image as the query (visual search) — see the API reference →.

Or try it in the browser at pixelrag.ai, or run the demo notebook in Colab — it renders a page and searches the hosted index, with the images inline.

What it is

PixelRAG renders documents — web pages, PDFs, images — as screenshots and retrieves over the images directly. Visual structure that HTML parsing throws away — tables, charts, layout, infographics — stays intact, so the reader model can actually answer questions about it. Wikipedia's 8.28M articles ship as a pre-built index; the pipeline itself is general-purpose.

Give Claude eyes

The renderer also ships as a Claude Code plugin — the pixelbrowse skill. Instead of fetching raw HTML, Claude screenshots a page with pixelshot and reads the image, so it sees charts, diagrams, tables, and layout the way a person does.

Install it — no clone needed. Install the pixelshot CLI so it's on your PATH (use uv tool or pipx to keep it isolated yet always available to Claude — a plain `