Firecrawl handles the unglamorous part of feeding the web to a language model: rendering JavaScript, following pagination, stripping navigation and cookie banners, and returning markdown or structured JSON that a model can actually use.
It exposes crawling, scraping, and search behind one API, and it is the piece most retrieval pipelines end up needing before anything interesting can happen.
Decisive facts
- JavaScript rendering with automatic boilerplate removal
- Markdown, structured JSON, or screenshot output per page
- Whole-site crawling with depth and pattern controls
- Schema-guided extraction into typed objects
- Self-hostable, with SDKs for Python and TypeScript