Apify Actors

Apify Actors

v0.13.0
MIT
Featured Web & Search
scrapingdata-extractionapifyautomation

Summary

Apify's official MCP server — turn thousands of ready-made scrapers into tools your assistant can call.

Features

  • Call thousands of maintained scrapers as tools
  • Search the Actor store and add tools dynamically
  • Structured results from sites with no public API

Installation

Set up this MCP server in your favorite AI agent — copy a ready-made configuration below.

Any MCP-compatible agent

Most agents (Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, and more) read a standard mcpServers configuration.

  1. Open your agent's MCP configuration file.
  2. Merge the snippet below into it, filling in the environment variables with your own values.
  3. Restart the agent — the "Apify Actors" tools will be available.
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify-actors": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@apify/actors-mcp-server"
      ],
      "env": {
        "APIFY_TOKEN": "your-apify-token"
      }
    }
  }
}

Description

Apify's official MCP server exposes its Actor marketplace to an AI assistant, which is an efficient way to give an agent web-data capabilities without building any scrapers.

What it unlocks

Thousands of maintained Actors covering search engines, social platforms, marketplaces, maps, job boards, review sites, and general-purpose crawling. Each one has a documented input schema, so the assistant knows what parameters to supply, and returns structured data rather than HTML.

How it works

  • Dynamic tool discovery. The assistant can search the Actor store and add relevant Actors as tools mid-conversation, rather than being limited to a preconfigured list.
  • Direct execution of any Actor with parameters, returning the dataset it produces.
  • Dataset access for retrieving results from past runs.

Why it beats writing a scraper

Actors are maintained by their authors. When a target site changes its markup, someone else fixes it. For an agent that needs data from a dozen different sites, that maintenance difference is the whole argument.

Requires an Apify account and token; runs with npx -y @apify/actors-mcp-server. Free monthly credits cover light use.

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