firecrawl monitor
Detect when content on a website changes and get notified by webhook or email. Firecrawl handles fetching, diffing, judging, and notifying server-side. Each page in a check is labeled same, new, changed, removed, or error.
Pick a target mode by what you're watching:
| Mode | Flags | Watches |
|---|
| Single page | --page <url> | one URL, for changes |
| URL batch | --scrape-urls <url,url,...> | several URLs, for changes |
| Whole site | --crawl-url <root-url> | every page a crawl discovers, for changes |
| Web search | --queries <q,...> + --goal | the whole web, for new results matching the goal |
The first three watch URLs you already have. Web search runs your queries each check and alerts on results it hasn't seen before (labeled new once, same on later checks); --goal is required with --queries.
Quick start
# Single page, natural-language schedule, email alert
firecrawl monitor create --name "Blog" --schedule "every 30 minutes" \
--goal "Alert when a new blog post is published." \
--page https://example.com/blog \
--email alerts@example.com
# Web monitor — search the whole web for NEW results matching a goal
firecrawl monitor create --name "Competitor launches" --schedule "daily at 9:00" \
--queries "competitor product launch,competitor funding round" \
--goal "Alert when a competitor announces a new product or raises funding." \
--search-window 7d --max-results 20 \
--email alerts@example.com
# Webhook notifications
firecrawl monitor create --name "Docs webhook" --schedule "every 30 minutes" \
--goal "Alert when docs content changes." \
--page https://example.com/docs \
--webhook-url https://example.com/hook \
--webhook-events monitor.page,monitor.check.completed
# Manage and inspect
firecrawl monitor list --limit 20
firecrawl monitor get <monitorId>
firecrawl monitor run <monitorId> # trigger a check now
firecrawl monitor checks <monitorId> # list all checks
firecrawl monitor check <monitorId> <checkId> --page-status changed
firecrawl monitor update <monitorId> --state paused
firecrawl monitor delete <monitorId>
Subcommands: create | list | get | update | delete | run | checks | check. Run firecrawl monitor <subcommand> --help for the full option list.
Done when: create returns a monitor ID and a smoke-test run + check confirms the expected target, state, and notification configuration.
Read goals.md when writing or refining --goal (and --queries for web monitors). Read json-tracking.md when the user cares about specific structured fields (price, headline, stock flag) and wants per-field diffs.
Constraints & tips
- Each check uses credits for its underlying scrape, crawl, or search, plus optional judging. See Monitoring pricing.
- Minimum schedule interval is 5 minutes. Monitoring is not available for zero-data-retention teams.
- Prefer one monitor over repeated one-off scrapes whenever the user wants the same URL checked more than once.
- Silence temporarily with
update --state paused; reserve delete for monitors that are permanently done. (--state is an update flag; --status is the global CLI status flag.)
- Filter check pages with
--page-status changed (or new, removed, error) to skip the noise from same pages.
firecrawl monitor run <id> triggers a check immediately — useful for smoke-testing a monitor right after creating it.--retention-days controls how long snapshots are kept for diffing. Lower it for high-frequency monitors to save storage.- External email recipients must opt in. First time they're added, Firecrawl sends a confirmation email and they only receive alerts after they confirm. Team-owned addresses are auto-confirmed. Once a recipient unsubscribes, they must be re-added by the owner for a fresh confirmation email.
- On HTTP 429 / rate-limit errors, back off once: wait ~30s and retry once. If it persists, stop, report the rate limit as the blocking reason, and delete any monitors created for this task. Never retry in a loop.
- Monitor-triggered scrapes default
maxAge to 0 — every check performs a fresh scrape unless scrapeOptions.maxAge is set explicitly in a JSON payload.
See also