Scrape a web page

www.firecrawl.dev4 stepsAgent View (.md)

Overview

Firecrawl is a context API that scrapes, searches, and interacts with the web at scale, converting messy HTML into clean markdown or structured data that large language models can consume directly. Before wiring the /scrape endpoint into an application, it's useful to confirm what output a given URL produces, especially for JavaScript-heavy, gated, or region-specific sites where rendering behavior can vary. The Scrape playground on www.firecrawl.dev lets you test this interactively: enter any URL, run the scrape, and inspect the resulting markdown or structured data on the spot.

Before you begin

  • A web browser with access to www.firecrawl.dev
  • A Firecrawl account (sign in via the dashboard) if the playground requires authentication to run a live scrape request; you can create one free at https://www.firecrawl.dev/app/api-keys
  • The target URL you want to scrape (this example uses https://www.firecrawl.dev)

Watch the recording

Step by step

1
Navigate

Open www.firecrawl.dev in your browser to access the Firecrawl homepage, where the Scrape playground is available for testing the /scrape endpoint interactively.

Tip. The playground lets you test scraping without writing any code, so it's a good first step before integrating the endpoint into an application.
Step 1
2
Click

Click into the URL input field of the Scrape playground to prepare it for entering the target web address.

Step 2
3
Type

Type the target URL, https://www.firecrawl.dev, into the input field. This is the page Firecrawl will fetch and convert to clean markdown.

Tip. You can substitute any publicly accessible URL here, including JavaScript-heavy or gated pages, since Firecrawl renders and parses the real page content rather than just static HTML.
Step 3
4
Click

Click the submit (Scrape) button to send the request to the /scrape endpoint and generate the clean markdown output for the entered URL.

Tip. If the request fails, check the response panel for an error code and consult the Errors reference at https://docs.firecrawl.dev/api-reference/errors for the cause and remedy.
Step 4

Confirm it worked

  1. 1The playground displays a response panel showing clean markdown (or structured data) generated from the submitted URL
  2. 2No error message or non-2xx status is shown in the response panel
  3. 3The returned content visually corresponds to the text and structure of the page at the submitted URL

Common issues