How to Use Apify MCP for Web Scraping at Scale

What is the Apify MCP?

Apify is a platform for large-scale web scraping and browser automation, providing a marketplace of pre-built scrapers called Actors. The Apify MCP connects Claude Code to the Apify platform, letting Claude discover, run, and monitor Actors for scraping websites, extracting data from social platforms, automating browsers, and processing the resulting datasets.

Installation

mcpizy install apify

Create an Apify account and copy your API token from console.apify.com/account/integrations. Provide it during MCPizy setup.

Key Capabilities

• Discover and run Actors — search the Apify marketplace for purpose-built scrapers and run them with custom inputs.
• Monitor Actor runs — track run status, duration, and compute unit consumption.
• Retrieve datasets — download the results of completed Actor runs as JSON or CSV.
• Manage key-value stores — read and write arbitrary data between Actor runs.
• Schedule runs — set up recurring scraping jobs on a cron schedule.

Example Usage

Scrape LinkedIn company profiles for competitive intelligence:

// Claude will:
// 1. Search Apify marketplace for a LinkedIn Company Scraper Actor
// 2. Run the Actor with a list of company URLs
// 3. Monitor the run until completion
// 4. Download and summarize the extracted profiles

Tips and Best Practices

• Use pre-built Actors from the marketplace before building custom scrapers — many already handle anti-bot measures.
• Monitor compute unit consumption — some Actors are CPU-intensive; preview costs before large-scale runs.
• Combine with Firecrawl MCP for simpler single-page scraping tasks; use Apify for complex, multi-page or authenticated scraping.
• Store results in Apify Datasets for structured data and Key-Value Stores for blobs and unstructured outputs.

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