firecrawl-monitor

Keeps checking a page, a whole site, or even the open web on a schedule you set, and emails you the moment something you care about changes or shows up.

WHEN TO USE

SCOPE

USE FOR

Get an email the moment a blog publishes a new post.
Watch every page of a site and hear about anything that changes.
Get alerted when a competitor launch shows up anywhere on the web.
Send a webhook event whenever a docs page's content changes.
Track just one thing on a page, like its price, and ignore the rest.

NOT FOR

Running this on a zero-data-retention team — monitoring isn't available there.

This is a saved copy of the skill's SKILL.md instructions. It may differ from the upstream file or the version you install.

In this document (4)

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>

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.

firecrawl-scrape — one-off scrape; escalate to monitor when checks become recurring
firecrawl-crawl — one-off crawl; pair with --crawl-url here for recurring crawl diffs
firecrawl — top-level workflow guide
firecrawl-build-scrape — building recurring checks into an app instead of running it here

This skill ships inside the Firecrawl CLI plugin.

Run this outside your AI tool, using Node.js 22.20.0 or newer. Skills CLI 1.7.2 skips skill selection; prompts cancel installation without an interactive terminal. If choosing Project when asked about installation scope, open your project's folder before running this.

Install checklist

Check selected tools if a picker appears; Claude Code may be unchecked under Additional agents. ↑/↓ moves, Space toggles selections, Enter confirms.
Without a tool picker, check Installing to: for your intended tool. Stop if it names a different tool.
If asked, choose Symlink (Recommended) for shared files or Copy to all agents for separate copies; review the summary before confirming installation.
Install the find-skills skill? defaults to Yes, adding another skill for all projects. Choose No if you don't want that extra installation.

Skills CLI 1.7.2 sends install data to skills.sh by default, including the source, skill names, target tools and file details; GitHub sources are reported only when GitHub confirms the repository is public, while other remote sources can also be reported. Confirmed-public GitHub sources also trigger a security-audit request. Before installing, set the environment variable DO_NOT_TRACK=1 or DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 to disable both.

npx skills add firecrawl/cli --skill firecrawl-monitor firecrawl firecrawl-agent firecrawl-alexandria firecrawl-crawl firecrawl-developer-index firecrawl-download firecrawl-interact firecrawl-map firecrawl-parse firecrawl-research-index firecrawl-scrape firecrawl-search --full-depth

It installs 13 skills: this one and the 12 it relies on, listed below. Once these skills are installed where Claude Code loads them, their descriptions help Claude decide when to use them.

What's inside

Files included with this skill.

View on GitHub

firecrawl monitor

Quick start

Constraints & tips

See also

Local tool required

What's inside

firecrawl-monitor

firecrawl monitor

Quick start

Constraints & tips

See also

Local tool required

What's inside

More skills

MCP keyword matches