Firecrawl Government Index

Search statutes, regulations, codes, court opinions, and other government publications

Firecrawl Government Index searches US federal, state, and local statutes, regulations, codes, court opinions, and other government publications. It helps an agent find the legal or regulatory text behind a question. Ranked matches can also include historical versions, bill text, agency guidance, and third-party reproductions; a match is not a guarantee of current governing law.

• Find the regulation that sets a labeling, reporting, or licensing requirement
• Read the statute or code section behind a compliance question
• Locate a court opinion that interprets a rule
• Pull the government publication an agency issued on a topic

Choose and verify sources

Include the jurisdiction, agency or citation, and relevant date when known. Ask for a missing jurisdiction before identifying the governing rule. If the user supplies a source URL, read it directly with scrape instead of searching again.

Before answering a current-law question, verify the source’s issuer, jurisdiction, enacted/effective status, and version. Read the source behind a match when the snippet cannot establish the rule. Check a bill’s status and effective date rather than inferring them from its title or digest. Cite the controlling section and supporting passage, and only give a page, section, or effective-date detail that the evidence supports.

The index focuses on US material. Use general search for other jurisdictions or missing coverage; no hits does not establish that no applicable law exists.

Endpoints

Task	Endpoint
Search the Government Index	GET or POST /search/gov

Search the Government Index

Send a natural-language question and get back ranked results from legal and regulatory sources. Results come back in the standard web group, each with url, title, description, and position, the same shape as a web result from /search.

Government Index searches are free and use no credits, with or without zero data retention. No API key is needed to get started; add one for higher rate limits.

The SDK examples use the Gov methods available in firecrawl@4.44.1 and firecrawl-py==4.49.2. Set FIRECRAWL_API_KEY for the authenticated SDK examples; use the HTTP examples for keyless requests. If an installed client lacks the method, upgrade the SDK. In Python, call gov_search on the initialized client instance; class-only reflection may not list methods assigned during initialization.

cURL

# No API key needed to get started; add -H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" for higher rate limits:
curl -s "https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/search/gov?query=food%20labeling%20requirements%20for%20allergens&k=10"

POST is available on the same path with the same fields as a JSON body:

cURL

# No API key needed to get started; add -H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" for higher rate limits:
curl -X POST https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/search/gov \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "food labeling requirements for allergens",
    "k": 10
  }'

query is required. k sets how many results come back, from 1 to 100, defaulting to 10. Unknown fields are rejected with 400. See the Government Index search reference for the full request and response schema.

The same search is also available on /search as categories: ["gov"], with results in data.web.

The hosted MCP server exposes this index as firecrawl_gov_search, and the CLI as firecrawl gov. Neither writes anything.