Firecrawl MCP Server for Zed

Overview

The Firecrawl MCP for Zed turns a standard web‑scraping service into a first‑class data source for AI assistants. By exposing Firecrawl’s API through the Model Context Protocol, developers can ask an assistant to fetch structured content from any URL—articles, product pages, forums, or internal documentation—without writing custom fetch logic. This capability is especially valuable when building conversational agents that need up‑to‑date information from the web, or when integrating real‑time data into a knowledge base.

The server handles authentication, request routing, and response formatting. A simple JSON configuration in Zed’s supplies the Firecrawl API key and, if needed, a custom instance URL. Once enabled in an assistant’s profile, the MCP presents a single tool to the agent: “fetch web content”. The assistant can then invoke this tool, receive a clean JSON payload containing the page’s title, body text, metadata, and optional images, and incorporate that data into its responses or store it for later use.

Key features include:

• Seamless web scraping – no need to manage headless browsers or deal with rate limits; Firecrawl handles crawling and parsing.
• Structured output – the server returns JSON that preserves headings, lists, tables, and media links, making it easy for downstream processing.
• Self‑hosted support – developers can point the MCP to a private Firecrawl instance, giving full control over data residency and cost.
• Agent‑ready integration – the tool is automatically available in Zed’s agent mode, allowing assistants to call it as part of a conversation flow.

Typical use cases span content aggregation bots that pull news articles into a knowledge base, customer support agents that fetch product specifications on demand, or research assistants that gather academic abstracts during a session. By integrating Firecrawl via MCP, developers can focus on conversational logic while offloading the complexity of web data extraction to a proven service.