Today, we're launching the Government & Legal Index, a free index of 30 million US government pages that you can search from ChatGPT, Claude, or the Firecrawl API.
It covers everything from federal statutes and court opinions to city codes and permit fee schedules. In other words, a lot of the rules that shape everyday life, plus plenty you might not know about until you need them.
Most of this information is already public. Finding it is the hard part. It's spread across thousands of government websites, each with its own structure, search tools, and collection of PDFs.
Public, but hard to find
Ask an AI agent a legal or regulatory question and it'll often start with a web search. You might get a law firm's summary, a forum thread, or a government page that points to another government page. The actual rule can be surprisingly hard to track down.
Summaries can be useful, but they can also be out of date or refer to a different jurisdiction. When the answer matters, it's worth being able to find the original source.
We kept hearing the same thing from teams building tax, compliance, permitting, and legal research tools: they wanted a way for their agents to search official government information directly.
That's what the Government & Legal Index is for.
Say you want to sell tacos in Austin
You've got the truck, the recipe, and a name you're probably a little too proud of (Taco the Town). Now you need to figure out what it takes to sell tacos from a window in Austin, Texas.
It's not just one question. You may need to look at state licensing requirements, fire inspections, and rules for disposing of wastewater. And if local responsibilities are changing, an older guide might point you to the wrong place.
With the Government & Legal Index, your agent can search across these sources in one go. It can find the Texas health department's mobile food vendor guide, the Austin Fire Department's inspection information, and Austin Water's wastewater rules, each on the agency's own website. If you're considering a spot outside city limits, it can also find the Travis County Fire Marshal's checklist and the relevant county code.
Each result links back to its source, so you can read the actual requirements before buying the propane.
The index won't replace a lawyer or the person behind the permit counter. It can help you show up with better information and fewer unanswered questions.
What's in the index
The index covers 30 million pages from federal, state, county, and city government sources.
That includes:
- Federal and state: Statutes, regulations, court opinions, filings, and agency guidance.
- County and city: Municipal codes, zoning ordinances, permit requirements, and fee schedules.
- Other public resources: Tax forms, procurement notices, and government publications.
The index is US-only for now. It also connects pages with the laws and cases they cite, helping agents find related material rather than treating every page as an isolated result.
Use it where you already work
With the Firecrawl plugin, you can search the Government & Legal Index from ChatGPT and Claude, bringing government sources into the research workflows you already use.
It's useful for questions like:
- What permits do I need to open a business in this city?
- Which regulations apply to a particular property?
- Where can I find the official guidance behind a tax question?
- Which court opinions interpret this statute?
- Are there local government contracts worth bidding on?
For developers, the index is available through the /search/gov API endpoint, the firecrawl_gov_search tool in our hosted MCP server, and the firecrawl gov CLI command.
Searches are free and don't use Firecrawl credits. You can get started without an API key; adding one increases your rate limits. Scraping a result to retrieve its full text uses standard scrape credits.
Search with the API
curl -s -X POST https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/search/gov \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{"query": "Austin mobile food vendor permit requirements", "k": 10}'Search with the CLI
firecrawl gov "Austin mobile food vendor permit requirements" --limit 10Queries tend to work better when you include the relevant jurisdiction. Naming an agency, citation, or year can help narrow the results further.
The Government Index documentation has more details on the endpoint and its parameters.
As with any search tool, results aren't a guarantee that a rule is current or applies to your situation. Check the source, jurisdiction, and effective date before relying on an answer.
Try it today
The Government & Legal Index joins the Developer Index and Research Index in Alexandria, Firecrawl's collection of searchable sources for AI agents.
Try it the next time you need to track down a permit, check a tax rule, or find the regulation behind an answer.
Explore the Government & Legal Index →
Public information is only useful if you can find it. Now your agents have another way to look.
