Quick: copy this and run

Auth (hosted only): Authorization: Bearer $CRW_API_KEY. Self-hosted (http://localhost:3000) needs no header.

Body:

{ "query": string, "limit": number (default 5, max 20), "lang"?: "en", "tbs"?: "qdr:d|w|m|y", "sources"?: ["web"|"news"|"images"] }

Python (stdlib only — defaults to hosted, fails loudly if key is missing)

#!/usr/bin/env python3 """Search CRW and print top results as JSON.""" import json, os, sys, urllib.request API_KEY = os.environ.get("CRW_API_KEY") # Default to the hosted API. Self-hosting? Set CRW_API_URL=http://localhost:3000 BASE = os.environ.get("CRW_API_URL", "https://api.fastcrw.com") URL = f"{BASE}/v1/search" headers = {"Content-Type": "application/json"} if API_KEY: headers["Authorization"] = f"Bearer {API_KEY}" elif BASE.startswith("https://api.fastcrw.com"): sys.exit("error: CRW_API_KEY is required for the hosted API. " "Get one at https://fastcrw.com (500 free credits) " "or set CRW_API_URL=http://localhost:3000 to self-host.") req = urllib.request.Request( URL, data=json.dumps({"query": "renewable energy trends 2024", "limit": 3}).encode(), headers=headers, method="POST", ) with urllib.request.urlopen(req) as r: body = json.loads(r.read()) # body == {"success": true, "data": [...]} # Results live under body["data"]. Each row has `title`, `url`, `snippet`, # `description`, `position`, `score`, `category` — print the LLM-ready subset. print(json.dumps( [{"title": x["title"], "url": x["url"], "snippet": x["snippet"]} for x in body["data"]], indent=2, )) # Run with: python3 search.py (file is python3-only — no `python` alias needed)

cURL

curl -X POST https://api.fastcrw.com/v1/search \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $CRW_API_KEY" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"query":"renewable energy trends 2024","limit":3}'

CLI (one-shot LLM-ready output)

The crw CLI projects directly to the title/url/snippet schema with --json --fields — no jq reshape needed:

# Install: brew install us/crw/crw (or: cargo install crw-cli) crw search "renewable energy trends 2024" --json --fields title,url,snippet --limit 3 # Available fields: title, url, description, snippet, position, score, category # --json is shorthand for --format json (also accepts --format text|markdown) # Self-hosted: no auth. Hosted: export CRW_API_KEY=crw_live_...

Response shape

{ "success": true, "data": [ {"url": "https://...", "title": "...", "description": "...", "snippet": "...", "position": 1, "score": 9.5} ] }

Other endpoints

POST /v1/scrape {"url":"...","formats":["markdown"]} — one URL → markdown

POST /v1/map {"url":"...","limit":50} — discover URLs

POST /v1/crawl {"url":"...","maxPages":5} — async multi-page; poll GET /v1/crawl/{id}

POST /v1/scrape with formats:["json"] + jsonOptions.schema — structured extract

Response Shapes

Use this page when you want the common CRW envelopes in one place. The endpoint pages stay the source of truth for behavior; this page is the quick shape reference.

Scrape

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "markdown": "string or null",
    "html": "string or null",
    "rawHtml": "string or null",
    "plainText": "string or null",
    "links": ["string"],
    "json": {},
    "summary": "string or null",
    "llmUsage": {
      "inputTokens": 1234,
      "outputTokens": 567,
      "totalTokens": 1801,
      "estimatedCostUsd": 0.00023,
      "model": "gpt-4o-mini",
      "provider": "openai"
    },
    "chunks": [
      {
        "content": "string",
        "score": 0.91,
        "index": 0
      }
    ],
    "warnings": ["content truncated to 100000 bytes before summarization"],
    "warning": "optional warning",
    "metadata": {
      "title": "string",
      "description": "string",
      "sourceURL": "https://example.com",
      "statusCode": 200,
      "elapsedMs": 32
    }
  }
}

Crawl Start

{
  "success": true,
  "id": "550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000"
}

Crawl Status

{
  "success": true,
  "status": "completed",
  "total": 12,
  "completed": 12,
  "data": [
    {
      "markdown": "# Page content",
      "metadata": {
        "sourceURL": "https://example.com/page"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Map

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "links": [
      "https://example.com",
      "https://example.com/about"
    ]
  }
}

Search

data is a wrapper around the actual results. When you do not use any LLM feature, the wrapper still holds the results in data.results and the other fields stay empty/null.

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "results": <flat array OR grouped object — see below>,
    "answer": "string or null",
    "citations": [
      { "url": "https://...", "title": "...", "position": 0 }
    ],
    "llmUsage": { "inputTokens": 3420, "outputTokens": 96, "totalTokens": 3516, "estimatedCostUsd": 0.0008, "model": "gpt-4o-mini", "provider": "openai" },
    "warnings": []
  }
}

results shape:

flat array when sources is not set
grouped object when sources is set

Flat (each entry may also carry markdown from scrapeOptions and summary from summarizeResults):

[
  {
    "url": "https://example.com/article",
    "title": "Article Title",
    "description": "Search snippet...",
    "position": 1,
    "score": 9.5,
    "markdown": "# Article Title\n\n…",
    "summary": "Short LLM-generated digest of this single result."
  }
]

Grouped:

{
  "web": [{ "url": "...", "title": "..." }],
  "news": [{ "url": "...", "title": "...", "publishedDate": "2026-04-02T14:00:00" }]
}

answer, citations, and the top-level llmUsage are populated only when answer: true was sent. Per-result summary is populated only when summarizeResults: true was sent.

Error Envelope

{
  "success": false,
  "error": "Human-readable error message",
  "error_code": "machine_readable_code"
}

CRW — open-source web scraper & crawler (Firecrawl-compatible)