Handling Tough Web Scrapes with Firecrawl

I have spent many hours trying to scrape websites only to be met with blank pages or immediate blocks. It is a common headache for developers when a standard HTTP fetch just isn’t enough to get the data you need. Sometimes the site relies too heavily on JavaScript, or the bot detection is just too aggressive for a simple script to handle.

If you find yourself stuck with empty results, adding a hosted extraction service to your workflow is my top recommendation.

What You’ll Need

• A Firecrawl account.
• A Firecrawl API key.

Quick Start

Firecrawl works as a fallback for the web_fetch tool. It handles the heavy lifting like bot circumvention and caching for you. OpenClaw follows a specific order for extraction: it tries local Readability first, then moves to Firecrawl if configured, and uses basic HTML cleanup as a final resort.

To get started, generate your API key in the Firecrawl dashboard. You can either set FIRECRAWL_API_KEY in your gateway environment or put it directly in your configuration file.

Here is the configuration structure you need:

{
  tools: {
    web: {
      fetch: {
        firecrawl: {
          apiKey: "FIRECRAWL_API_KEY_HERE",
          baseUrl: "https://api.firecrawl.dev",
          onlyMainContent: true,
          maxAgeMs: 172800000,
          timeoutSeconds: 60,
        },
      },
    },
  },
}

A few things to keep in mind:

• firecrawl.enabled turns on automatically as soon as you provide an API key.
• maxAgeMs determines how long a cached result stays valid. The default is 172800000 ms, which is 2 days.

Troubleshooting

Unexpected Credit Usage OpenClaw uses proxy: "auto" and storeInCache: true for all Firecrawl requests. The auto setting is helpful because it automatically retries with stealth proxies if a basic attempt fails. However, these stealth retries can consume more credits than a standard scrape.

Stale Content If you are getting old data, check your maxAgeMs setting. This parameter controls the cache age. If the content on the site changes frequently, you might want to lower this value from the 2-day default.

If you run into other configuration hurdles, you can ask the AI Setup Assistant for help.

What’s Next

• Web tools