Web Scraping with Firecrawl

Web Scraping with Firecrawl

This skill enables intelligent web scraping and data extraction using Firecrawl.

When to Use

Use Firecrawl when you need to:

• Extract content from web pages and convert to markdown
• Crawl multiple pages from a website
• Search the web and retrieve scraped results
• Discover all URLs on a website (sitemap generation)
• Get summaries, screenshots, or links from web pages

Available Tools

firecrawl_scrape

Scrape a single URL and return clean content.

• Best for: Single page extraction, documentation pages, articles
• Formats: markdown, html, rawHtml, screenshot, links, summary

firecrawl_batch_scrape

Scrape multiple URLs in a single request.

• Best for: Known list of specific pages
• Returns: Array of content from each URL

firecrawl_crawl

Crawl an entire website starting from a URL.

• Best for: Comprehensive site extraction, documentation sites
• Returns: Content from multiple discovered pages
• Note: Async operation - use firecrawl_check_crawl_status to poll until complete

firecrawl_check_crawl_status

Check the status of an ongoing crawl operation.

• Use after starting a crawl to monitor progress
• Poll until status is "completed" or "failed"

firecrawl_map

Discover all URLs on a website.

• Best for: Site structure analysis, pre-crawl planning
• Returns: Array of discovered URLs

firecrawl_search

Search the web and return scraped results.

• Best for: Research, finding current information
• Returns: Search results with scraped content

Available Formats

When scraping, you can request different output formats:

• markdown - Clean markdown content (default)
• html - Raw HTML content
• rawHtml - Unprocessed HTML
• screenshot - Screenshot of the page
• links - Extract all links from the page
• summary - AI-generated summary of the content

Best Practices

1. Start with map: For large sites, use firecrawl_map first to understand the site structure

2. Use appropriate tool:

   • Known single URL → scrape
   • Known multiple URLs → batch_scrape
   • Unknown pages on a site → crawl
   • Need to find pages → search

3. Handle crawls automatically: When crawling, always poll firecrawl_check_crawl_status until complete - don't ask users to check manually

4. Choose the right format: Use summary for quick overviews, markdown for full content, links for navigation analysis

5. Handle rate limits: Be mindful of API credits and rate limits on large operations

6. JavaScript-rendered content: Firecrawl automatically handles dynamic content - no special configuration needed

Example Workflows

Research Task

1. Use search to find relevant pages
2. Use scrape on promising results for full content

Documentation Extraction

1. Use map to discover all documentation pages
2. Use crawl or batch_scrape to extract content
3. Poll check_crawl_status until complete

Quick Page Summary

1. Use scrape with summary format for a quick overview
2. Follow up with full markdown scrape if more detail needed