Firecrawl Build Search

Use this when the application starts with a query, not a URL.

Use This When

• the user asks a question and the product must discover sources first
• the feature needs current web results
• you want to turn a search query into a shortlist of pages for later scraping

Default Recommendations

• Use /search first when URL discovery is part of the product behavior.
• Keep search and extraction conceptually separate unless scraping search results is clearly required.
• Prefer selective follow-up extraction over broad hydration when cost or latency matters.

Common Product Patterns

• answer generation with cited sources
• company, competitor, or topic discovery
• research workflows that produce a shortlist of web pages before deeper extraction
• query-to-URL pipelines for later /scrape or /interact

Note that "research workflow" here means discovering web pages. If the product is searching published papers, that is a different surface — see the escalation rules below.

Escalation Rules

• If you already have the URL, use firecrawl-build-scrape.
• If the result page then requires clicks or form in…