By Dan Donovan, @askdandonovan
Claude can't visit websites and pull structured data on its own. Apify can. Connect the two once, and you can ask for a lead list, a competitor's posts, or a pile of reviews in plain English, and get a real dataset back.
Apify is a marketplace of ready-made scrapers. Someone has already built and maintained the tool that pulls data out of Google Maps, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Amazon, or any regular website. You just point it at a target and it hands back clean, structured data.
Each of those tools is called an Actor. There are over 52,000 of them in the Apify Store. You don't install any of them. They run on Apify's servers, not your laptop.
So what does connecting it to Claude do? It turns those 52,000 tools into things Claude can pick up and use by itself. You ask in English, Claude works out which Actor to run, runs it, gets the data back, and then does the thinking part: sorting it, summarising it, spotting the pattern. Scraping and analysis in one move, instead of a CSV you have to go and deal with.
This is the prompt you'll paste once you're connected. It's the whole point of the four steps below. Read it now so the setup has a destination.
Use the Google Maps Scraper on Apify to find [plumbers] in [my suburb].
Cap it at 25 results.
Give me a table: business name, phone, website, star rating, review count.
Then tell me which three have the weakest online presence, and why.Ten minutes from now that returns a real, sorted list of businesses in your market, with the analysis already done.
This is the account that actually runs the scrapers. Sign up with Google, GitHub, or an email address. There's no credit card step.
That's the whole step. Your free plan includes $5 of platform credit every month, which is enough to pull hundreds of Google Maps listings while you work out whether this is useful to you.
This is the one to do if you use Claude in the desktop app, in the browser, or in Cowork. It's the same connector for all three. Set it up once and it follows you across them.
In Claude, go to Settings → Connectors and click Browse connectors. Search for Apify and add it.
Claude opens a browser tab asking you to sign in to Apify and authorise the connection. Click allow. That's it. No API key to copy or paste anywhere.
To check it worked, start a new chat and ask Claude: "What Apify tools do you have?" It should list things like searching the store and running Actors.
Skip this if you don't use Claude Code. Step 2 is enough on its own. If you do, it's one command in your terminal.
claude mcp add --transport http apify https://mcp.apify.com --scope user--scope user makes Apify available in every project on your machine. Leave it off and it only works in the folder you're currently in.
Now start Claude Code and run this to sign in:
/mcpPick apify from the list, choose Authenticate, and approve it in the browser tab that opens. The same /mcp command shows you a green connected status afterwards.
Don't test it with something abstract. Test it with your own market, so the output is worth keeping. Paste this and swap the trade and suburb for yours:
Use the Google Maps Scraper on Apify to find plumbers in Parramatta, NSW.
Cap it at 25 results so we don't burn credit.
For each one, give me: business name, phone, website, star rating, and
review count. Skip any without a phone number.
Show it as a table, sorted by review count, highest first. Then tell me
which three look like the weakest online presence and why.Claude will find the right Actor, ask you to approve the run, then hand back a table. The last line is the bit that matters. That's the part a bought lead list can't do.
This is the part most guides skip, so here it is straight. There are two layers, and only the first one is covered by your free plan.
Every Actor's price is shown on its own page in the store before you run anything, so you're never guessing. Connecting Apify to Claude costs nothing extra by itself. There's no fee for the connection, only for the runs.
Easiest way to stay honest with yourself, just ask before you commit:
Before you run anything: what does this Actor charge, and roughly what
will 25 results cost me? If it's pay-per-result, say so and wait for me
to confirm.The store has 52,000 Actors, which is useless as a starting point. These are the jobs that come up over and over for a business owner:
Every one of these does the scrape and the thinking. Swap the bracketed bits for yours and paste them in.
Find out what's working for someone else before you post again.
Use the Instagram Scraper on Apify to pull the last 30 posts from
[@competitorhandle]. Get caption, likes, comments, and post URL.
Then: rank them by engagement, show me the top 5, and tell me what those
5 have in common that the bottom 5 don't — hook style, format, topic,
length. Be specific, not generic.
Finish with 3 content angles they haven't covered that I could own.Their 1-and-2-star reviews are your positioning, written by their customers.
Use Apify to pull Google reviews for the top 5 [dentists] in [Bondi].
Up to 100 reviews each, and tell me the cost before you run it.
Filter to 1, 2 and 3 star reviews only. Find the 5 complaints that come
up most often across all of them, with a real quote for each.
Then write 3 positioning angles a new [dentist] could use that speak
directly to those complaints. Plain language, no marketing waffle.Their offer, pricing and promises, side by side with yours.
Use the Website Content Crawler on Apify to crawl [competitor.com].
Max 25 pages.
Summarise: what they sell, their pricing if it's public, their guarantees,
and exactly who they say they're for.
Then crawl [mysite.com] the same way and give me a side-by-side table of
where their offer is stronger than mine. Be blunt — I want the gaps, not
reassurance.The filtering is the value. Anyone can pull 500 names.
Use the Google Maps Scraper on Apify to find [cafes] in [Newtown, NSW].
Cap at 50 results.
Then filter to only the ones that look like they need help: no website,
or fewer than 20 reviews, or rated under 4.0.
Give me a table with name, phone, website, rating, review count, and a
one-line note on why they made the list. Save it as a CSV I can open
in Excel.You don't browse 52,000 tools. You ask Claude to browse them, because searching the store is one of the things the connection gives it.
Search the Apify store for Actors that can [scrape LinkedIn company pages].
Show me the top 3 by popularity and rating. For each one: what it does,
what it charges, and what it needs as input.
Then recommend one and tell me why — including why you didn't pick the
other two.You can also browse it yourself at apify.com/store and sort by users. The ones with hundreds of thousands of runs are popular for a reason.
Every Actor needs the same four things. Miss one and you get a mess back, so say all four up front: