citilink-connector

Citilink Connector

Reads Citilink inside the operator's Chrome over CDP. The whole domain answers HTTP 429 (stricter than DNS), and its data transport is gRPC-web — a binary protobuf protocol that is not worth reversing. A real Chrome passes Qrator and renders the pages, so the connector reads the DOM instead.

When to use

• Search Citilink by text
• One product's price, old price, availability

Tools available

• citilink_search(query) — tiles from the rendered search page
• citilink_card(product_url) — one card. The URL carries /product/<slug>/, where the slug ends in a numeric id: /product/noutbuk-lenovo-2169270/.

Not an MCP tool: citilink_selfcheck() is a tri-state canary. It is CLI-only — marketplace-mcp doctor runs every connector's canary at once.

Why the price used to come back null

Citilink renders the currency glyph in a separate element from the digits:

<span data-meta-price="59990"><span>59 990</span><span>₽</span></span>

The old extractor filtered text lines for руб|₽ and so never saw a line carrying both. Title parsed, price did not — on every product.

Read the data-meta attributes, not the class names

Citilink's class names are build-hashed (app-catalog-51bw0j-…) and change with every deploy, so they are useless as selectors. The site publishes a stable data-meta-* contract for its own analytics, and that is what the extractor keys on:

attribute	holds
data-meta-name="Snippet__title"	the product name anchor
data-meta-name="Snippet__price"	the current price (glyph in a child span)
data-meta-name="Snippet__old-price"	the strikethrough price, no glyph
data-meta-price="59990"	the exact amount, machine-readable

data-meta-price needs no parsing and cannot be confused with an instalment or a badge, so it is preferred; the display strings are the fallback.

If prices start coming back null, check whether those attributes still exist before touching anything else — a class-name change is expected and harmless, a data-meta-* change is the real drift.

Numbers in a tile that are not the price

A tile also carries - 10% (discount badge), в 1356 пунктов (delivery points), (от 8 дней) (delivery estimate), a rating and an opinion count. Only a number attached to the currency glyph is treated as the price. Also note the first product anchor in a tile is an empty overlay link — it has no text, so the title comes from the Snippet__title anchor.

Gotchas

• gRPC-web is deliberately not reversed: DOM extraction is the maintainable route.
• A green citilink_selfcheck proves the page rendered and the extractor returned a shape. It does not prove the numbers are right — for that, open the product page in the same Chrome and compare.
• From a datacenter address the domain answers 429, so nothing can be verified there. This connector only means anything from the operator's own machine.
• A Qrator page that loads with HTTP 200 answers challenge_required: open citilink.ru in the scraping Chrome, pass the check, retry. It is never cached and never returned as a product.
• A missing price is null, never 0: price_rub: null means Citilink had no usable price for the tile — treat it as no data, never as a free item.

DSH activation

In DeepSeek Harness, the default profile exposes only compare_prices and compare_sources through the cheap compare mount. Per-marketplace tools and marketplace_sources require RU_MARKETPLACE_MCP_FULL=1 and a profile restart; do not call them in the default mode.