# Firehose Documentation

> Real-time web monitoring. Create rules, stream every matching page as it's crawled, and watch specific URLs for changes.

Firehose monitors the web in real time. You write **rules**, and every crawled
page that matches is delivered to you over a **Server-Sent Events** stream — typically within
moments of the page being crawled. 

Need to track a handful of specific pages instead of the whole
web? **URL Watch** crawls them on a schedule and surfaces the diffs.

<CardGrid>
  <Card title="Quickstart →" href="/get-started/quickstart">
    Go from zero to a live stream of matching pages in five minutes.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Core concepts →" href="/get-started/core-concepts">
    Organizations, taps, rules, and the crawl → match → stream pipeline.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Stream →" href="/stream/overview">
    The core product: rules, the SSE stream, and the full query language.
  </Card>
  <Card title="URL Watch →" href="/url-watch/overview">
    Track specific URLs for changes on a schedule and read the diffs.
  </Card>
</CardGrid>

## Ways to use Firehose

Most integrations consume the **Stream**. Reach for the **dashboard feed** to explore matches before
you write any code, and **URL Watch** when you already have the exact URLs you want checked on a
schedule.

| Surface | What it is | Reach for it when | Metered as |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Stream** (SSE) | Real-time push of every match as it's crawled | You're integrating code and want matches the moment they happen | Prepaid credit, per match |
| **Dashboard feed** | Browse and triage matches in the UI, no code | You want to watch or explore matches without building anything | Monthly reviewable-match quota |
| **URL Watch** | Scheduled re-crawl of specific URLs, with stored diffs | You already know the URLs and want changes on your cadence | Monthly check quota |

The Stream and the feed are two views of the same thing: rules on a **tap** match pages across the
whole web, and you either consume them as an SSE stream or watch them arrive in the dashboard. URL
Watch is different — it re-crawls a fixed list of URLs you give it.

A tap only surfaces a page when the crawler reaches it, on the crawler's own schedule — so to reliably
catch changes to a **specific** page, reach for URL Watch, not a tap with a `url:` rule.

## Built for agents

Every page in these docs has a **Copy for LLM** button and a raw-Markdown twin — just append `.md`
to any URL (for example, [`/get-started/quickstart.md`](/get-started/quickstart.md)). There's also
an [`llms.txt`](/llms.txt) index and a full [`llms-full.txt`](/llms-full.txt) corpus you can feed to
a model in one shot.