Skip to content

[Bug] Incorrect 500 Error When Scraping Empty Webpage Content #2316

@Km-mayank

Description

@Km-mayank

Describe the Bug
When scraping a webpage that contains no visible or extractable content, the Firecrawl API returns a 500 status code with the following response:

{
  "success": false,
  "code": "SCRAPE_ALL_ENGINES_FAILED",
  "error": "All scraping engines failed! -- Double check the URL to make sure it's not broken. If the issue persists, contact us at help@firecrawl.com."
}

This seems misleading since the request is valid and the target page is accessible — it just has empty content. A 500 suggests a server-side failure, but the actual situation is that there’s simply nothing to scrape.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the issue:

  1. Use the /scrape endpoint with a valid but empty webpage URL (e.g. a blank HTML page).
  2. Example request:
POST /scrape
{
 "url": "https://example.com/empty-page"
}
  1. Observe that the response is a 500 error with code SCRAPE_ALL_ENGINES_FAILED.

Expected Behavior

Instead of returning a 500, the API should:

  • Return a successful response with empty content (e.g. { "content": "" }),
or
  • Return a 204 (No Content) or 4xx-level response that accurately indicates there’s nothing to scrape.
    This helps distinguish between true scraping engine failures and pages that are empty.

Screenshots
N/A — see JSON response above.

Environment (please complete the following information):

  • OS: macOS Tahoe 26.0.1
  • Deployment Type: Cloud (firecrawl.dev)
  • Firecrawl Version:Not applicable (using hosted API)
  • Node.js Version: Not applicable (tested via Postman)

Logs
If needed, I can provide the request/response logs showing the 500 and the URL used.

Additional Context
This behavior causes false positives for “engine failure” conditions in client applications that expect Firecrawl to handle empty pages gracefully.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    bugSomething isn't working

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions