firecrawl-scrape

firecrawl scrape

Scrape one or more URLs. Returns clean, LLM-optimized markdown. Multiple URLs are scraped concurrently.

Quick start

# Basic markdown extraction
firecrawl scrape "<url>" -o .firecrawl/page.md
 
# Main content only, no nav/footer
firecrawl scrape

Run firecrawl scrape --help for the full option list.

Done when: you have the scraped content — on stdout, in your -o file, or under .firecrawl/ for multi-URL scrapes — and have inspected it with bounded reads (head, grep) to answer the request.

PDFs and page budgets

PDFs cost 1 credit per parsed page. Use --max-pages (an integer from 1 to 10000) to limit PDF parsing, especially for large or unknown documents:

The cap applies to each PDF, not the whole command or total credits. Extra formats and options can add charges. The CLI does not quote page counts or costs before execution. Use JSON output to inspect the returned metadata.numPages (parsed), metadata.totalPages (document total), and metadata.creditsUsed when present; a smaller parsed count means the result is partial.

Tips

• Prefer plain scrape over --query. Scrape to a file, then use grep, head, or read the markdown directly — you can search and reason over the full content yourself. Use --query only when you want a single targeted answer without saving the page (costs 5 extra credits).
• Scrape handles static pages and JS-rendered SPAs. Escalate to interact when the page needs interaction (clicks, form fills, pagination) or scrape misses content.
• Multiple URLs are scraped concurrently — check firecrawl --status for your concurrency limit. This mode saves markdown only and ignores -o; other requested formats are dropped. If markdown wasn't requested, the whole JSON response is written into the .md file.
• Single format outputs raw content. Multiple formats (e.g., --format markdown,links) output JSON.
• Always quote URLs — shell interprets ? and & as special characters.
• Naming convention: .firecrawl/{site}-{path}.md

See also

• firecrawl-search — find pages when you don't have a URL
• firecrawl-interact — when scrape can't get the content, use interact to click, fill forms, etc.
• firecrawl-download — bulk download an entire site to local files
• firecrawl-build-scrape — building scrape into an app instead of running it here