Put 6,000+ pre-built scrapers at your assistant's fingertips through one MCP endpoint.
Most scraping conversations end with "…and then someone has to build and maintain the scraper." The Apify MCP server skips that step. Apify's marketplace hosts thousands of Actors — pre-built, maintained scrapers and automation tools for specific targets: Google Maps listings, Instagram profiles, TikTok posts, Amazon products, LinkedIn pages, news sites and plenty of long-tail sources you'd never build a scraper for yourself.
Through MCP, your assistant can search that marketplace, pick an appropriate Actor, run it with the right input and collect structured results — all inside one conversation. Ask for "the top-rated coffee shops in Lisbon with their ratings and addresses" and the assistant can find the Google Maps scraper Actor, run it, and hand back clean JSON, no selectors or proxies in sight.
That's the key difference from generalist crawlers like Firecrawl: Apify Actors encode site-specific knowledge. A dedicated Instagram Actor knows about pagination quirks, rate limits and data layout in a way no generic crawler can. The trade-off is cost model complexity — each Actor bills by its own usage — and a dependency on the marketplace having a good Actor for your target (it usually does).
The server runs in two modes: a hosted remote endpoint at mcp.apify.com, or locally via npm. Remote is the sensible default; it's always current with the marketplace and needs nothing but your API token.
fetch-actor-details before call-actor. The input schema tells you which fields are actually required, and the pricing block tells you whether a run costs cents or real money.maxItems (or whatever the Actor calls it) on the first attempt. Testing a Google Maps or Instagram Actor on ten results before requesting ten thousand saves a long wait and a surprise invoice.get-dataset-items on big runs instead of asking for everything in one response.Compare MCP servers by category, or browse hosted MCP servers if you prefer an endpoint over a local process.
Google Maps, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon and thousands of other targets already have maintained Actors.
Pull business listings, reviews and social profiles into structured datasets from a plain-language request.
Long-tail sources that would never justify custom scraper development.
Check the linked publisher documentation and your connected client's tool list. Names and availability can vary with the server version and account permissions.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| search-actors | Search the marketplace for Actors matching a task |
| fetch-actor-details | Read an Actor's description, input schema and pricing |
| call-actor | Run an Actor with given input and wait for results |
| get-dataset-items | Retrieve the structured results a run produced |
{
"mcpServers": {
"apify": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "mcp-remote", "https://mcp.apify.com/sse",
"--header", "Authorization: Bearer your-apify-token"]
}
}
}Get the token from Apify Console → Settings → API & Integrations.
An Apify account and API token. Actors bill per use — check each Actor's pricing before large runs.
| Variable | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
| APIFY_TOKEN | Apify API token used to run Actors and bill usagee.g. apify_api_... | Yes |
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