# OpenClaw (/quickstarts/openclaw)

<!-- agent-signals: reading_time_min: 3 · est_tokens: 986 · updated: 2026-07-30 -->
Related: [Node.js](/quickstarts/nodejs.md), [Next.js](/quickstarts/nextjs.md), [Express](/quickstarts/express.md), [NestJS](/quickstarts/nestjs.md), [Fastify](/quickstarts/fastify.md), [Hono](/quickstarts/hono.md)

Integrate Firecrawl with OpenClaw to give your agents the ability to scrape, search, crawl, extract, and interact with the web — all through the [Firecrawl CLI](/sdks/cli).

## Why Firecrawl + OpenClaw [#why-firecrawl--openclaw]

* **No local browser needed** — every session runs in a remote, isolated sandbox. No Chromium installs, no driver conflicts, no RAM pressure on your machine.
* **Real parallelism** — run many browser sessions at once without local resource fights. Agents can browse in batches across multiple sites simultaneously.
* **Secure by default** — navigation, DOM evaluation, and extraction all happen inside disposable sandboxes, not on your workstation.
* **Better token economics** — agents get back clean artifacts (snapshots, extracted fields) instead of hauling giant DOMs and driver logs into the context window.
* **Full web toolkit** — scrape, search, and browser automation all through a single CLI that your agent already knows how to use.

## Setup [#setup]

Tell your agent to install the Firecrawl CLI, authenticate and initialize the skill with this command:

```bash
npx -y firecrawl-cli init --browser --all
```

* `--all` installs the Firecrawl skill to every detected AI coding agent
* `--browser` opens the browser for Firecrawl authentication automatically

or install everything seperately:

```bash
npm install -g firecrawl-cli
firecrawl init skills
firecrawl login --browser
# Or, skip the browser and provide your API key directly:
export FIRECRAWL_API_KEY="fc-YOUR-API-KEY"
```

Verify everything is set up correctly:

```bash
firecrawl --status
```

<Tip>
  Once the skill is installed, your OpenClaw agent automatically discovers and uses Firecrawl commands — no extra configuration needed.
</Tip>

## Scrape [#scrape]

Scrape a single page and extract its content:

```bash
firecrawl https://example.com --only-main-content
```

Get specific formats:

```bash
firecrawl https://example.com --format markdown,links --pretty
```

## Search [#search]

Search the web and optionally scrape the results:

```bash
firecrawl search "latest AI funding rounds 2025" --limit 10

# Search and scrape the results
firecrawl search "OpenClaw documentation" --scrape --scrape-formats markdown
```

## Browser [#browser]

Launch a remote browser session for interactive automation. Each session runs in an isolated sandbox — no local Chromium install required. `agent-browser` is pre-installed with 40+ commands.

```bash
# Shorthand: auto-launches a session if none is active
firecrawl browser "open https://news.ycombinator.com"
firecrawl browser "snapshot"
firecrawl browser "scrape"
firecrawl browser close
```

Interact with page elements using refs from the snapshot:

```bash
firecrawl browser "open https://example.com"
firecrawl browser "snapshot"
# snapshot returns @ref IDs — use them to interact
firecrawl browser "click @e5"
firecrawl browser "fill @e3 'search query'"
firecrawl browser "scrape"
firecrawl browser close
```

<Note>
  The shorthand form (`firecrawl browser "..."`) sends commands to `agent-browser` automatically and auto-launches a sandbox session if there isn't one active. Your agent issues intent-level actions (`open`, `click`, `fill`, `snapshot`, `scrape`) instead of writing Playwright code.
</Note>

## Example: tell your agent [#example-tell-your-agent]

Here are some prompts you can give your OpenClaw agent:

* *"Use Firecrawl to scrape [https://example.com](https://example.com) and summarize the main content."*
* *"Search for the latest OpenAI news and give me a summary of the top 5 results."*
* *"Use Firecrawl Browser to open Hacker News, get the top 5 stories, and the first 10 comments on each."*
* *"Crawl the docs at [https://docs.firecrawl.dev](https://docs.firecrawl.dev) and save them to a file."*

## Further reading [#further-reading]

* [Firecrawl CLI reference](/sdks/cli)
* [Browser Sandbox docs](/features/browser)
* [Agent docs](/features/agent)