Ahrefs Firehose setup
New forum threads and Q&A pages, as the Ahrefs crawler finds them.
What it does
Firehose is Ahrefs' real-time web monitor. You give it rules, and every page its crawler visits that matches one is delivered within minutes. It covers forums that search engines index slowly or not at all.
- One tap per project in your Firehose account, with rules built from the project's keywords and kept in sync when you edit them
- Each check, the forum threads, discussions and Q&A pages that matched since the last one (Reddit and Hacker News are left to their own free watches)
Get set up
- Sign up at firehose.com and create a management key (it starts with
fhm_) - Paste it in Settings → Conversations → Firehose management key
- That's it: the next check creates a tap named Larvabot: your project with its rules. Matches start as Ahrefs crawls new pages, so the first check usually finds nothing
Where it goes
In the dashboard, open Settings and find the Conversations (optional keys) section. Secret values are encrypted before they're saved and only their last four characters are ever shown again.
FIREHOSE_API_KEYfirehose.com → Management keys. Adds new forum threads and Q&A pages from the Ahrefs crawler. Paid per match ($5 per 1,000); the monthly cap is on Usage & limits.
Staying free
At most 20 matches per project per check, and a monthly cap of 600 by default (change it on **Usage & limits**). Firehose itself stops at your balance.
How the quota guard works →Larva tip
Firehose's free plan allows one active tap. With more than one project, use the pay-as-you-go API plan, which has no tap limit.
Larva tip
Rules Larvabot creates are tagged larvabot. Rules you add to the same tap yourself are left alone and their matches arrive too.
Larva tip
Deleting a project in Larvabot doesn't delete its tap. Revoke it in Firehose if you no longer need it.
Fallback order
For conversations, Larvabot tries these in order and skips any that aren't set up, are out of free quota or are busy.
- 1Hacker News search (Algolia)
- 2Stack Exchange API
- 3YouTube comments (Data API)
- 4GitHub issues & discussions
- 5Bluesky search
- 6Threads (official API)
- 7Lemmy (federated communities)
- 8Discourse forums
- 9Ahrefs Firehose
- 10Web discussions (your search keys)