firecrawl-deep-research
Produce an intensive, cited analytical report: executive summary, multi-angle findings, contrarian views, open questions, and full sources. Use only when the user needs rigorous synthesis of a complex topic (scientific, technical, policy, or market-analytical) that cannot be answered with a short search, and wants a formal written report, not a recommendation list. Do not use for product picks, top-N lists, quick lookups, or routine "find out about X" tasks. If the request does not clearly need this kind of report, do not use this skill. Do not use for a literature review over published papers. This skill collects evidence from the open web. A request for the literature on a biomedical, clinical, life-science, or other scientific topic — papers, studies, trials, preprints — belongs to firecrawl-research-papers, which queries Firecrawl's paper index (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv) instead of searching websites.
- Installs
- 35.5K
- Last 24h
- +37
- Trending rank
- #4045
- Security
- Warn
Install
Works with every agent the skills CLI supports.
npx skills add https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows --skill firecrawl-deep-research- 01
Install
Run the command in your project. The CLI asks which agents to install for.
- 02
Describe the task
Ask your agent for something this skill covers. It loads firecrawl-deep-research automatically when relevant.
- 03
Review the result
The agent follows the SKILL.md steps, scripts and references bundled with the skill.
Security audits
Independent scans of the skill's instructions and bundled files.
SKILL.md
The instructions your agent reads when the skill is triggered.
Firecrawl Deep Research
Use this only for report-scale research: a rigorous, cited synthesis the user explicitly wants delivered as a formal written report. If the request is a product pick, a top-N list, a quick lookup, or anything answerable with a short search, stop; do not use this skill, let the request be handled the standard way.
This skill gathers its evidence from the open web. If the evidence base is the published literature — a literature review, or a biomedical, clinical, or other scientific topic where the answer lives in papers — use firecrawl-research-papers instead; it queries Firecrawl's paper index rather than searching websites.
Onboarding Interview
Infer the topic and output format from context. Before starting, unless already specified, always ask one short question to define the scope:
"How long do you want this research task to run?"
Map the answer to a depth tier in the Collection Plan below:
- A few minutes → Quick
- ~10-15 minutes → Thorough
- Longer / no limit → Exhaustive
If the topic itself is unclear, you may ask at most 1-2 additional concise questions (topic, or a critical angle/source constraint). Otherwise proceed once the runtime is set.
Firecrawl Collection Plan
Use Firecrawl search and scrape through the CLI or equivalent tool surface. Match depth to the runtime the user chose during onboarding.
- Quick (~a few minutes): search 3-5 queries and scrape 5-10 high-quality sources.
- Thorough (~10-15 minutes): search 5-10 queries from different angles and scrape 15-25 sources.
- Exhaustive (longer): search 10+ queries and scrape 25+ sources, including primary sources, research papers, expert views, and contrarian sources.
Avoid re-scraping URLs already returned with full content from a search-with-scrape result.
When Published Papers Are The Evidence
Search and scrape reach web pages. They do not query Firecrawl's research paper index, which holds paper abstracts with full text reachable per paper — largely biomedical and life-science literature from PubMed, bioRxiv, and medRxiv, plus arXiv preprints in CS, physics, and math.
Hand off to firecrawl-research-papers
when the report's evidence base is the published literature — a biomedical,
clinical, drug, gene, disease, epidemiology, or public-health topic, or any
request phrased as a literature review, systematic review, or survey of studies.
That skill uses firecrawl_research_* (MCP) / firecrawl research (CLI) to
search abstracts, expand to related papers, and verify claims inside a paper
body — none of which plain search and scrape can do.
If the report needs both — the literature and market, policy, or news context — run the paper work through that skill and keep the web collection above for the rest, then synthesize here.
Note that passing categories: ["research"] to Firecrawl search does not query
the paper index either. It filters an ordinary web search to research-affiliated
websites — the list includes PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, and publisher
sites — and returns their web pages, not the paper records behind them.
Parallel Work
If appropriate, use sub-agents or equivalent parallel task runners by research angle:
- overview and definitions
- technical or implementation details
- market and industry context
- contrarian views, risks, and limitations
- primary sources and official docs
Each researcher should return claims, source URLs, source quality notes, and uncertainty.
Final Deliverable
Default structure:
# Deep Research: [Topic]
## Executive Summary
[2-3 paragraphs]
## Key Findings
[Numbered findings with source links]
## Detailed Analysis
[Themes, evidence, and synthesis]
## Contrarian Views And Risks
[Counterarguments, limitations, failure modes]
## Open Questions
[What remains uncertain]
## Sources
[Every URL used with a one-line note]
## Rerun Inputs
workflow: firecrawl-deep-research
topic: [topic]
depth: [quick/thorough/exhaustive]
output: [markdown/json/brief]
Quality Bar
- Cite sources for factual claims.
- Prefer primary sources when available.
- Flag uncertainty and conflicting evidence.
- Synthesize instead of listing scrape summaries.
FAQ
What does the firecrawl-deep-research skill do?
Produce an intensive, cited analytical report: executive summary, multi-angle findings, contrarian views, open questions, and full sources. Use only when the user needs rigorous synthesis of a complex topic (scientific, technical, policy, or market-analytical) that cannot be answered with a short search, and wants a formal written report, not a recommendation list. Do not use for product picks, top-N lists, quick lookups, or routine "find out about X" tasks. If the request does not clearly need this kind of report, do not use this skill. Do not use for a literature review over published papers. This skill collects evidence from the open web. A request for the literature on a biomedical, clinical, life-science, or other scientific topic — papers, studies, trials, preprints — belongs to firecrawl-research-papers, which queries Firecrawl's paper index (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv) instead of searching websites.
How do I install firecrawl-deep-research?
Run npx skills add https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows --skill firecrawl-deep-research in your project. The skills CLI detects the agents you use and copies the skill into the right folder. For Claude Code you can also place the skill folder at ~/.claude/skills/firecrawl-deep-research/ (personal) or .claude/skills/firecrawl-deep-research/ (project).
Which AI agents can use firecrawl-deep-research?
Any agent that supports the open Agent Skills format (a folder with a SKILL.md file), including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, Cline, OpenCode and more.
Is firecrawl-deep-research safe to install?
Security partners have reviewed it: Gen Agent Trust Hub passed; Socket passed; Snyk flagged items to review. As with any skill, read the SKILL.md and bundled scripts before installing.
Who maintains firecrawl-deep-research?
It is published by firecrawl in firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows, and it is an official skill from the maker of the technology it covers. It has 35,476 recorded installs.
More from firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows
firecrawl-research-papers
firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows
Find and synthesize research papers, whitepapers, PDFs, technical reports, and academic sources with Firecrawl Research, using semantic paper search, related-paper expansion, and in-body verification over Firecrawl's paper index — largely biomedical and life-science literature from PubMed, bioRxiv, and medRxiv, plus arXiv preprints in CS, physics, and math. Use when the user wants a literature review, systematic review, survey of studies, paper summary, research landscape, or sourced synthesis from scholarly and industry publications, including clinical, drug, gene, disease, epidemiology, and public-health topics. Prefer this over a general web-research workflow whenever the evidence base is published papers rather than web pages.
firecrawl-website-design-clone
firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows
Extract an existing website's visual system into DESIGN.md, or collect its existing logo, colors, fonts and homepage messaging for a document. Use for reference-based UI implementation, documenting design patterns, or matching a presentation to a company's website. Excludes inventing a new brand or brand positioning.
firecrawl-workflows
firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows
Run focused Firecrawl workflows for research, documentation lookup, SEO audits, QA, lead discovery and enrichment, business contacts, current jobs, fantasy decisions, brand assets, knowledge bases and website design systems. Use when the user wants a sourced answer or deliverable from a workflow rather than raw extraction or product-code integration.
firecrawl-knowledge-base
firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows
Build a knowledge base from web content with Firecrawl. Use for local reference docs, RAG-ready chunks, fine-tuning datasets, documentation mirrors, topic corpora, or LLM-ready markdown organized from web sources.
firecrawl-market-research
firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows
Research markets and companies with Firecrawl using current, cited figures: market size, growth, trends, financials and earnings. Use when the user asks for market research, an industry overview or a comparison of companies by the numbers, since these figures change faster than training data.
firecrawl-seo-audit
firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows
Inspect a website's titles, meta descriptions, headings, canonicals, structured data and internal links for on-page and technical SEO issues. Use for SEO audits, page-source checks, broken-link reviews or comparing pages for target keywords, even without an explicit request to scrape. Return source-backed findings and prioritized fixes. Excludes generic SEO explanations, standalone copywriting and functional website testing.
Popular education & science skills
teach
mattpocock/skills
Teach the user a new skill or concept, within this workspace.
scaffold-exercises
mattpocock/skills
Create exercise directory structures with sections, problems, solutions, and explainers that pass linting. Use when user wants to scaffold exercises, create exercise stubs, or set up a new course section.
paper-context-resolver
lllllllama/rigorpilot-skills
Rigor Paper Context helper for README-first deep learning repo reproduction. Use only when the README and repository files leave a narrow reproduction-critical gap and the task is to resolve a specific paper detail such as dataset split, preprocessing, evaluation protocol, checkpoint mapping, or runtime assumption from primary paper sources while recording conflicts. Do not use for general paper summary, repo scanning, environment setup, command execution, title-only paper lookup, or replacing README guidance by default.
caveman-learn
juliusbrussee/caveman
Act on a Caveman learn report - review the ranked token sinks, apply cost-lowering fixes with per-edit consent, and report what those fixes returned. Use when asked to lower an agent's token cost, what caveman has saved, to trim a heavy CLAUDE.md, or to offload re-pasted context into cavemem.
gsap-plugins
greensock/gsap-skills
Official GSAP skill for GSAP plugins — registration, ScrollToPlugin, ScrollSmoother, Flip, Draggable, Inertia, Observer, SplitText, ScrambleText, SVG and physics plugins, CustomEase, EasePack, CustomWiggle, CustomBounce, GSDevTools. Use when the user asks about a GSAP plugin, scroll-to, flip animations, draggable, SVG drawing, or plugin registration.
teach-impeccable
pbakaus/impeccable
DEPRECATED: Use /impeccable teach instead. This command has been folded into the impeccable skill.