Firecrawl is an API service designed for scraping and crawling websites to extract clean data in various formats, including markdown and structured data. Currently in development, it offers features like mapping URLs, searching the web, and extracting content with customizable options, all while enabling self-hosted deployment or usage through a hosted API.

The article discusses methods to avoid captchas and blocks while using a crawling API. It emphasizes the importance of employing techniques that minimize detection by websites, thereby ensuring smoother data extraction processes without interruptions. Various strategies and tools are outlined to help users efficiently navigate web scraping challenges.