Firecrawl + Claude Code: Turn Reddit Threads Into a Skill

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We built a Claude Code skill from five Reddit threads in about ten minutes of Claude Code work: 3,020 words of rules for growing an affiliate niche site, each rule linked to the thread it came from. Firecrawl found the threads in 66 seconds. Then it refused to open them, because Firecrawl doesn’t support reddit.com. Here is the workaround that made it work, step by step.

Everything below ran on November 8, 2026, in a fresh Claude Code session (Opus 5.5) with no custom instructions, on Firecrawl’s free connection without an account. Our agents filmed the whole session for a video. The numbers come from that session’s logs.

Watch the full session (8 min 41):

What does Firecrawl do in Claude Code?

Firecrawl turns web pages into clean markdown, the format an AI reads best. It drops menus, cookie banners and scripts, and keeps the content. In Claude Code, it gives the agent five tools: Scrape (one page), Crawl (a whole section of a site), Map (a site’s list of pages), Search (a web search with results) and Parse (a file you saved, such as a PDF or a web page).

We use Firecrawl next to Context7, which gives Claude Code the documentation of code libraries. Firecrawl covers the rest: Reddit threads, blog posts and the documentation Context7 doesn’t index.

Claude Code talks to Firecrawl through an MCP server (a small connector that gives Claude new tools). The Firecrawl MCP documentation lists three ways to plug it in:

This is the .mcp.json we put at the root of the demo project, the keyless version:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "firecrawl": { "type": "http", "url": "https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp" }
  }
}

With an account, the docs add your key as a bearer token on the same endpoint, and the tool list grows to Crawl, Map and more.

Step 1: find the right Reddit threads with Firecrawl Search

Firecrawl Search finds Reddit threads, but it only returns their titles and snippets. Our first request to Claude Code was: “Use Firecrawl to search Reddit for 2026 posts in r/juststart where people share niche site or affiliate case studies. List the 6 most useful threads with their links.”

It ran 7 Firecrawl searches and one scrape attempt, and came back after 66 seconds with six threads, their links and a one-line summary each: ten months of an Amazon affiliate site at 553k impressions, a programmatic SEO site at 700K impressions, a brand new site cited by ChatGPT with zero Google clicks. And its first line was honest: it picked them from search snippets, because Firecrawl couldn’t open Reddit pages.

To pick your own threads, choose a subreddit where people post their numbers, sort by top of the year, and keep the posts with real figures and long comment sections. The comments are where people push back on the numbers.

Step 2: why Firecrawl can’t read Reddit

Firecrawl refuses reddit.com on its side, before it even reaches Reddit. Asked to scrape a thread, it returned this, word for word:

Firecrawl can't scrape this site because it is currently not supported.
Check Alexandria for a relevant provider if available, or use another source.

We tried every variant on November 8, 2026: www.reddit.com, old.reddit.com and the .json address of a thread, keyless and with an API key. Same answer. Alexandria, Firecrawl’s catalogue of data providers, returned 0 tools for a Reddit URL.

Reddit adds its own wall. Logged out, our server got an empty page titled “Reddit”, and the .json address returned 403, from a datacenter IP and from a residential IP alike. Logged in, in a normal browser, the same .json address returns the whole thread as raw data, every comment included. That’s a handy trick for reading a thread, but Firecrawl Parse doesn’t take JSON files.

Step 3: save the threads and convert them with Firecrawl Parse

The workaround: open each thread in your logged-in browser, save the page, then send the saved file to Firecrawl Parse. Firecrawl can’t visit Reddit, but Parse reads HTML, PDF, Word, RTF, OpenDocument and spreadsheet files. Our first test turned one saved thread with 82 comments into 7,881 words of markdown: the post, the authors, the scores and the comments.

We saved five r/juststart threads from 2026 into a threads folder, then asked Claude Code: “Use Firecrawl Parse to turn each saved page into clean markdown, one file per thread in ./markdown.” It took 5 minutes 43 seconds for the five, because the hosted Parse tool works in two calls: an upload, then the conversion.

One detail is worth copying. Before uploading anything, Claude Code wrote: “Pages saved while logged in usually contain session and CSRF tokens.” It uploaded copies with scripts, hidden form fields and token meta tags removed. A page saved while you’re logged in carries traces of your session, so strip them before sending the file to any service.

And keep it small. Reddit’s User Agreement says you can’t “access, search, or collect data from the Services by any means (automated or otherwise) except as permitted”. We saved five threads by hand for our own research. Don’t automate it and don’t do it at scale.

Step 4: have Claude Code write the skill

A Claude Code skill is a SKILL.md file with instructions, and Claude Code can write one from your markdown in a single request. The skills documentation says Claude uses a skill when it’s relevant, or you call it with /skill-name.

Our request: “Read the 5 markdown threads and build a Claude Code skill at .claude/skills/niche-site-playbook/SKILL.md. It should teach how to grow an affiliate niche site in 2026: concrete rules, the numbers people reported, mistakes to avoid, and the link to the thread behind each rule.”

Two minutes later (122 seconds), the file was there, 3,020 words long:

• a sources table, T1 to T5, with each thread’s title, author and link;
• the numbers each thread reported, such as 553k impressions, 2.7% CTR and €284 in commissions for the ten-month Amazon site;
• rules in seven areas, from keyword choice to Amazon conversion;
• disagreements between commenters kept and marked “Contested”;
• a 13-row table of mistakes to avoid, and a funnel diagnostic from impressions to commissions.

The line we like most is in its instructions: “Present numbers as one operator’s report, not industry benchmarks.” Each figure comes from a single site, and the skill knows it.

Step 5: test the skill on a real question

The test is a fresh session and a question the threads never answered directly. We typed: “/niche-site-playbook My Amazon affiliate site is 3 months old, 25 articles, about 200 impressions a day and almost no clicks. What should I do next?”

The answer came in about 25 seconds. Its short version: at 3 months this is normal, the problem sits between impressions and clicks, so “spend the next 4 to 8 weeks improving the 25 pages you have, not writing 25 more”. Then six steps in order:

1. Find out why you get no clicks, in Search Console.
2. Rewrite titles and headings on pages that get impressions.
3. Check what your 25 articles target.
4. Link your pages together.
5. Set up Amazon tracking per page.
6. Publish only from your Search Console data.

Every step cites its thread, and the answer ends with a caveat: these numbers are self-reported, one operator each. Then it asks for your own 28-day Search Console totals to find where your funnel leaks. You can run the same method for any money skill you want to learn: Google Ads, SEO, Etsy, YouTube.

How far does the free Firecrawl plan go?

The free plan gives 1,000 credits a month with no credit card. One credit is one page, and a search costs 2 credits for 10 results. For research like this demo, that’s enough to learn with. For crawling whole sites, it’s a test, not a working setup: one crawl of 1,000 pages uses the month.

Our own account shows 306 credits used in August, 732 in September and 370 in October 2026. And between October 20 and November 20, all 1,000 were gone by November 8.

Prices from the Firecrawl pricing page, read on November 8, 2026.

Who shouldn’t use Firecrawl for this?

If you already run Scrapling or another scraper that works for you, keep it. Scrapling is a Python scraping framework with its own MCP server, and Firecrawl adds little to a setup that already does the job. Firecrawl fits people who work in Claude Code and want web data without building a scraper.

To see how AI answers pick their sources in the first place, read our comparison of AI visibility tracking tools and our explainer on GEO versus SEO. How we test explains how our agents run and log these sessions.