Connect AI agents to live web data with structured extraction
Firecrawl handles the process of reading web pages, clicking buttons, and retrieving data in structured formats. It is an API service that converts complex web structures into Markdown or JSON for AI consumption. Developers can connect agents to interact with the web in real time without managing proxies or JavaScript rendering.
How agents handle the web
Firecrawl provides an environment for AI agents to interact with the web, going beyond simple text conversion. After scraping a page, agents can perform actions like clicking, scrolling, and text input using AI prompts or code. For example, an agent can automatically search for a specific product in a shopping mall and click the first result. This interaction occurs after fetching a page with scrape and using the interact command, allowing agents to explore the web environment and extract data in real time.
Data extraction and automation features
The service offers various endpoints for web search, single-page scraping, full-site crawling, URL mapping, batch scraping, and change monitoring. The Agent feature retrieves necessary data from natural language descriptions even without a specific URL. For instance, entering 'Find Notion's pricing plans' allows the agent to search, navigate pages, and return results on its own. Document files like PDF or DOCX can also be converted into clean Markdown or structured JSON, enabling non-web document data to be processed through the same pipeline.
Connecting agents and MCP clients
Firecrawl provides methods to connect with various AI agents and MCP clients, including Claude Code, Antigravity, and OpenCode. A single command, npx -y firecrawl-cli@latest init --all --browser, adds web data access capabilities to an agent. Registering the firecrawl-mcp server via MCP configuration allows MCP-compatible clients to use web search and scraping features immediately. This process takes a few minutes and helps agents access real-time web data.
Performance and reliability metrics
Firecrawl covers 96% of the web and stably handles pages with heavy JavaScript usage. The P95 latency across millions of pages is 3.4 seconds, making it suitable for real-time agents and dynamic apps. Complex infrastructure issues such as proxy rotation, orchestration, rate limiting, and JavaScript-blocked content are resolved internally, so users receive clean data without additional configuration. This stability is verified through benchmarks and serves as a reliable foundation for large-scale web data collection tasks.
Pre-use considerations
Firecrawl is open-sourced under the AGPL-3.0 license, while the cloud version includes additional features. Running locally or self-hosting requires consulting the contribution and self-hosting guides. SDKs are available in Python, Node.js, Go, Java, Elixir, Rust, Ruby, .NET, and PHP, with installation commands provided for each language. When web scraping, users must comply with the target website's policies and robots.txt instructions, which is the user's responsibility. Using the cloud service requires an API key, which can be obtained by signing up at firecrawl.dev.
