Skip to main content

​
Playbook

​
Firecrawl — Agent Guidance

​
Action selection

  • Single page → firecrawl_scrape. Returns markdown by default.
  • Web search + content → firecrawl_search. Replaces Google search + individual page scraping in one call.
  • Site discovery → firecrawl_map first to enumerate URLs, then firecrawl_batch_scrape the ones you need.
  • Full site crawl → firecrawl_crawl_params_preview to estimate cost, then firecrawl_crawl.
  • Known URL list → firecrawl_batch_scrape. More efficient than individual scrapes.
  • Structured extraction → firecrawl_extract with a JSON schema or natural language prompt.
  • Complex web tasks → firecrawl_agent with a natural language instruction. The agent navigates pages autonomously.

​
Budget awareness

  • Cost scales with pages processed: scrape, crawl, batch scrape, and map are billed per page, search is billed per result, and agent and extract are dynamic.
  • Scrape options increase per-page cost. PDF parsing, JSON format, Enhanced Mode, and Zero Data Retention each add to the base page cost, and they stack.
  • Deepline credit pricing for these actions is generated from the provider pricing metadata and rendered on the public provider pages.
  • Firecrawl can charge when infrastructure processes a request even if the target returns 403/404. Avoid blind retries of blocked URLs; inspect metadata.statusCode.
  • Crawl defaults to limit: 10000 and Firecrawl preflights available balance against that limit. Always pass an explicit lower limit unless a 10000-page crawl is intentional.
  • crawl_params_preview is free and shows estimated usage before committing.

​
Async operations

  • crawl, batch_scrape, agent, and extract are async. They return a job ID immediately.
  • The action handler polls automatically for up to 5 minutes and returns results when ready.
  • For non-blocking usage, use the corresponding status-check action (get_crawl_status, etc.) to poll manually.
  • Cancel long-running jobs with the cancel actions when results are no longer needed.

​
Format recommendations

  • Use markdown format for LLM consumption (default).
  • Use html when you need the raw DOM structure.
  • Use links to extract all hyperlinks from a page.
  • Use screenshot when visual layout matters.

​
Rate limits

  • Standard rate limit is 15 requests/second.
  • Batch and crawl operations are rate-limited server-side; the API handles queuing.