Firecrawl Search

firecrawl search

Web search with optional content scraping. Returns search results as JSON, optionally with full page content.

When to use

• You don't have a specific URL yet
• You need to find pages, answer questions, or discover sources
• First step in the workflow escalation pattern: search → scrape → map → crawl → interact

Quick start

# Basic search
firecrawl search "your query" -o .firecrawl/result.json --json

# Search and scrape full page content from results
firecrawl search "your query" --scrape -o .firecrawl/scraped.json --json

# News from the past day
firecrawl search "your query" --sources news --tbs qdr:d -o .firecrawl/news.json --json

Options

Tips

• --scrape fetches full content — don't re-scrape URLs from search results. This saves credits and avoids redundant fetches.
• Always write results to .firecrawl/ with -o to avoid context window bloat.
• Use jq to extract URLs or titles: jq -r '.data.web[].url' .firecrawl/search.json
• Naming convention: .firecrawl/search-{query}.json or .firecrawl/search-{query}-scraped.json

Send feedback after every search (refunds 1 credit)

Search costs 2 credits. After you've actually used the results (or decided they were useless), send structured feedback with firecrawl search-feedback <id>. The first feedback per search refunds 1 credit and helps improve search quality. Do this once per search, in the background, after you finish processing the results — it does not block your main task.

Opt out: if FIRECRAWL_NO_SEARCH_FEEDBACK=1 (or FIRECRAWL_DISABLE_SEARCH_FEEDBACK=1) is set, the CLI silently skips the call and never sends anything. Respect that — do not try to work around it. (Team admins can also disable this server-side; the API will return feedbackErrorCode: "TEAM_OPTED_OUT" and the CLI will exit 0 silently.)

Rules to know before you call this:

• Time window: must be sent within ~2 minutes of the search. Late feedback is rejected.
• --missing-content is the most important field. It's a list of specific pieces of content you expected but did not find. One topic per entry — do not pack multiple topics into one string.
• Substantive content required (zero-effort feedback is rejected with HTTP 400):
  • good → must include at least one --valuable-sources entry.
  • partial → must include --valuable-sources or --missing-content.
  • bad → must include --missing-content or --query-suggestions.
• Daily refund cap (per team, per UTC day, default 100 credits). When dailyCapReached: true, stop calling search-feedback for the rest of the UTC day.
• Idempotent: re-submitting for the same search id returns success but no extra refund.
• --silent & is the right pattern — exit code 0 even on failure, so a rejected/expired call never crashes your pipeline.

Read the search response's id:

SEARCH_ID=$(jq -r '.id' .firecrawl/search-react-hooks.json)

Then send feedback. Pick the rating that matches what actually happened:

# Results were useful, with notes on what was still missing
firecrawl search-feedback "$SEARCH_ID" \
  --rating good \
  --valuable-sources '[{"url":"https://react.dev/reference/react/hooks","reason":"Most authoritative"}]' \
  --missing-content '[
    {"topic":"useDeferredValue","description":"No example of useDeferredValue with Suspense"},
    {"topic":"useTransition","description":"No coverage of useTransition for routing"}
  ]' \
  --query-suggestions "Boost react.dev for queries about react hooks" \
  --silent &

# Results were partially useful — multiple missing topics, one entry per topic
firecrawl search-feedback "$SEARCH_ID" \
  --rating partial \
  --missing-content '[
    {"topic":"useDeferredValue"},
    {"topic":"useTransition","description":"Need React 18+ examples"},
    {"topic":"Server Components hooks"}
  ]' \
  --silent &

--silent suppresses output and & runs it in the background so feedback never blocks you.

See also

• firecrawl-scrape — scrape a specific URL
• firecrawl-map — discover URLs within a site
• firecrawl-crawl — bulk extract from a site