CLI

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.

Discover and list a site's URLs, with search filtering. Use for "map the site" or "find the URL for" requests — when the user knows the site but not the exact page, or wants site structure.

Autonomous multi-page extraction into structured JSON. Use when the user wants website data matching a schema — pricing tiers, product listings — beyond a single-page scrape.

Bulk-extract many pages from one site or section. Use for "crawl", "everything under /docs", or content spanning linked pages.

Convert a local file (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, HTML, …) to markdown, or answer questions about its content. Use whenever the input is a file path, not a URL.

Extract a URL's content as clean markdown, including JS-rendered pages. Use whenever the user provides a URL and wants its content; prefer over WebFetch.

Web search with full page content. Use when no URL is known: finding sources, articles, or news. For papers use firecrawl-research-index; for library, API, error, or bug questions use firecrawl-developer-index.

Alert by webhook/email on web changes — use for "monitor/watch/track/alert me when": recurring checks on known URLs (prefer over repeated one-off scrapes) or web-wide watches for new results (queries + goal).

Save a site or section as local files (markdown, screenshots). Use for "download the site", offline docs, or a local copy for reference.

Drive a live browser on a scraped page: click, fill forms, log in, paginate, infinite-scroll. Use when content requires interaction or a scrape failed or returned incomplete content.

Find the papers that answer a research query in Firecrawl's research paper index — a corpus of paper abstracts whose largest share is biomedical and life-science literature (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv), alongside arXiv preprints in CS, physics, and math — using semantic search, semantic and structural expansion, and in-body verification. Use this skill for literature-finding and paper-retrieval tasks of any kind, including clinical, biomedical, drug, gene, disease, and other life-science questions, whether the answer is a single paper or a full multi-paper set. The index is reached only through the `firecrawl_research_*` MCP tools or the `firecrawl research` CLI subcommands. Calling `firecrawl_search` with its `categories` option set to `["research"]` is a different feature — it filters ordinary web search to research-affiliated websites (the list includes PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, and publisher sites) and returns page results from them, without querying the paper records in this index.

Search issues, merged pull requests, READMEs, and documentation. Use when the question is how a library or API behaves, what an error means, or whether a bug was fixed; prefer this over a general web page.