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.
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.
Extract structured company lists from directories with Firecrawl. Use for scraping YC, Crunchbase, Product Hunt, G2, startup directories, category directories, or custom company databases into JSON, CSV, CRM-ready lists, or research tables.
Monitor competitor pricing, features, changelogs, dashboards, and product changes with Firecrawl. Use for recurring competitive intelligence, pricing tier extraction, feature change tracking, or structured competitor alerts.
Bulk-extract many pages from one site or section. Use for "crawl", "everything under /docs", or content spanning linked pages.
Pull metrics from analytics dashboards and internal web tools with Firecrawl browser. Use when the user needs dashboard reporting, cross-platform metric summaries, authenticated analytics extraction, date-range reports, or structured metrics from web dashboards.
Produce an intensive, cited analytical report: executive summary, multi-angle findings, contrarian views, open questions, and full sources. Use only when the user needs rigorous synthesis of a complex topic (scientific, technical, policy, or market-analytical) that cannot be answered with a short search, and wants a formal written report, not a recommendation list. Do not use for product picks, top-N lists, quick lookups, or routine "find out about X" tasks. If the request does not clearly need this kind of report, do not use this skill. Do not use for a literature review over published papers. This skill collects evidence from the open web. A request for the literature on a biomedical, clinical, life-science, or other scientific topic — papers, studies, trials, preprints — belongs to firecrawl-research-papers, which queries Firecrawl's paper index (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv) instead of searching websites.
Walk through a product's key flows with Firecrawl browser and produce a structured UX/product walkthrough. Use for signup, onboarding, pricing, docs, dashboard, product demo prep, UX teardown, and first-run experience analysis.
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.
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.
Build a knowledge base from web content with Firecrawl. Use for local reference docs, RAG-ready chunks, fine-tuning datasets, documentation mirrors, topic corpora, or LLM-ready markdown organized from web sources.
Ingest public or authenticated knowledge bases and docs portals with Firecrawl browser. Use for JS-heavy docs, login-gated portals, paginated help centers, support knowledge bases, or structured JSON/markdown extraction from documentation sites.
Generate structured lead lists from prospect databases and web directories with Firecrawl browser. Use for finding prospects by role, company type, industry, stage, location, technologies, or other criteria and exporting CRM-ready JSON or CSV.
Produce pre-meeting lead intelligence briefs with Firecrawl. Use when the user needs company research, person research, recent news, talking points, pain points, or outreach preparation before a sales call, partnership meeting, investor conversation, or customer interview.
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.
Extract market, financial, earnings, industry, and company metrics with Firecrawl. Use when the user asks for market research, industry trends, public company data, financial comparisons, earnings research, or structured market reports.
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).
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.
QA test a live website with Firecrawl browser and scrape evidence. Use when the user wants exploratory QA, form testing, navigation/link checks, responsive checks, performance observations, bug reports, or a pre-launch quality review.
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.
Find and synthesize research papers, whitepapers, PDFs, technical reports, and academic sources with Firecrawl Research, using semantic paper search, related-paper expansion, and in-body verification over Firecrawl's paper index — largely biomedical and life-science literature from PubMed, bioRxiv, and medRxiv, plus arXiv preprints in CS, physics, and math. Use when the user wants a literature review, systematic review, survey of studies, paper summary, research landscape, or sourced synthesis from scholarly and industry publications, including clinical, drug, gene, disease, epidemiology, and public-health topics. Prefer this over a general web-research workflow whenever the evidence base is published papers rather than web pages.
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.
Audit a website's SEO with Firecrawl. Use when the user asks for an SEO audit, metadata and heading review, sitemap/site-structure analysis, keyword opportunities, competitor SERP comparison, or prioritized search optimization recommendations.
Research products across the web with Firecrawl and produce a shopping recommendation or cart-ready summary. Use when the user wants to compare products, find the best option, evaluate reviews, respect budget/preferences, or shop with a saved browser session.
Extract any website's design system into an agent-ready DESIGN.md using Firecrawl scrape evidence. Use when the user wants colors, fonts, spacing, components, layout patterns, or brand/UI guidance from a website so AI agents can create new websites, clone a look, or build pages inspired by that design.
Run outcome-focused Firecrawl workflows that produce deliverables such as research reports, literature reviews over published papers, SEO audits, QA reports, lead lists, knowledge bases, website design systems, and other structured web-data artifacts. Use when the user wants Firecrawl to complete a business, marketing, product, or creative workflow rather than merely scrape a page or integrate API calls into code.