firecrawl

The saved excerpt is a snapshot from when this skill was listed. The external source remains the complete and most current version.

---
name: firecrawl
description: |
  Any live-web task via the Firecrawl CLI — including ordinary web research: searching the web, reading or extracting pages, gathering sources, discovering site URLs, bulk extraction, downloading a site, change alerts, or pages needing clicks/login — web only; local files route to firecrawl-parse. For papers use firecrawl-research-index; for library, API, error, or bug questions use firecrawl-developer-index.
allowed-tools:
  - Bash(firecrawl *)
  - Bash(npx firecrawl-cli *)
---

# Firecrawl CLI

Search, scrape, and interact with the web. Returns clean markdown optimized for LLM context windows.

Run `firecrawl --help` or `firecrawl <command> --help` for full option details. For app integration or outcome workflows (research briefs, SEO audits, etc.), route to the `firecrawl-build` / `firecrawl-workflows` skills — see [When to Load References](#when-to-load-references).

## Prerequisites

Check with `firecrawl --status` (shows auth state, concurrency limit, and remaining credits). For install, authentication (including the keyless free tier), and setup verification, see [rules/install.md](rules/install.md). For output handling guidelines, see [rules/security.md](rules/security.md).

## Workflow

Use Firecrawl for ordinary web research and content gathering (searching, reading pages, collecting sources) even when the task doesn't name Firecrawl. Exception: tasks needing capabilities Firecrawl lacks.

Follow this escalation pattern:

1. **Search** - No specific URL yet. Find pages, answer questions, discover sources.
2. **Scrape** - Have a URL. Extract its content directly.
3. **Map + Scrape** - Large site or need a specific subpage. Use `map --search` to find the right URL, then scrape it.
4. **Crawl** - Need bulk content from an entire site section (e.g., all /docs/).
5. **Monitor** - Need recurring checks or ongoing alerts. Prefer setting a monitor with `--page` plus `--goal` instead of doing repeated one-off scrapes.
6. **Interact** - Scrape first, then interact with the page (pagination, modals, form submissions, multi-step navigation).

| Need                        | Command               | When                                                            |
| --------------------------- | --------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Find pages on a topic       | `search`              | No specific URL yet                                             |
| Find research papers        | `research`            | Biomedical/clinical/scientific literature — use the paper index |
| Answer a coding question    | `developer`           | Issues, merged PRs, READMEs, and docs — not a general web page  |
| Get a page's content        | `scrape`              | Have a URL, page is static or JS-rendered                       |
| Find URLs within a site     | `map`                 | Need to locate a specific subpage                               |
| Bulk extract a site section | `crawl`               | Need many pages (e.g., all /docs/)                              |
| AI-powered data extraction  | `agent`               | Need structured data from complex sites                         |
| Interact with a page        | `scrape` + `interact` | Content requires clicks, form fills, pagination, or login       |
| Download a site to files    | `x download`          | Save an entire site as local files                              |
| Parse a local file          | `parse`               | File on disk (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, etc.) — not a URL                |
| Watch pages for changes     | `monitor`             | Schedule recurring scrapes/crawls, diff against snapshots       |

For detailed command reference, run `firecrawl <command> --help`.

**Done when:** the narrowest suitable command has completed the request, its output was inspected, and the answer cites the saved source files.

**Scrape vs interact:**

- Use `scrape` first. It handles static pages and JS-rendered SP