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 Option Description --limit Max number of results --sources Source types to search --categories Filter by category --tbs Time-based search filter --location Location for search results --country Country code for search --scrape Also scrape full page content for each result --scrape-formats Formats when scraping (default: markdown) -o, --output Output file path --json Output as JSON 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 See also firecrawl-scrape — scrape a specific URL firecrawl-map — discover URLs within a site firecrawl-crawl — bulk extract from a site