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 "<url>" --only-main-content -o .firecrawl/page.md

# Wait for JS to render, then scrape
firecrawl scrape "<url>" --wait-for 3000 -o .firecrawl/page.md

# Multiple URLs (markdown only; each saved to .firecrawl/; -o is ignored)
firecrawl scrape https://example.com https://example.com/blog https://example.com/docs

# Get markdown and links together
firecrawl scrape "<url>" --format markdown,links -o .firecrawl/page.json

# Ask a question about the page
firecrawl scrape "https://example.com/pricing" --query "What is the enterprise plan price?"

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.

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