Apify 101 — 50,000 Scrapers and a Self-Updating Competitor Engine

July 8, 2026

Updated August 20, 2026

2 min read

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⭐ About This Clip

Eliot introduces Apify: a connector that hands Claude more than 50,000 community-built actors that scrape almost anything — Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Maps. His test run: telling Claude to scrape Google Maps for 150 local business email addresses in Truro. Claude picked the actor, ran it, and returned a ready spreadsheet for roughly 20 cents.

Carter Jensen then reruns the ToxiFree demo from this week's A2A session: a social-content-strategist prompt that finds the competitor accounts worth studying, quotes the scrape cost — about 35 cents — for approval, pulls real posts with real engagement, and lands everything in a Notion database sorted by engagement-per-follower, the column that exposes what actually went viral (some posts clear 198% because the For You page reaches non-followers). The kicker: he scheduled the whole run for every Monday at 9am, so the competitor database keeps building itself.

Key Points

Apify gives Claude 50,000 actors that scrape nearly any site
150 Google Maps business emails cost about 20 cents
The strategist prompt quotes scrape cost before running anything
Engagement-per-follower sorting exposes which competitor posts truly went viral
Scheduled Monday reruns turn one scrape into a self-updating database

Learning Objectives

By the end of this session segment, members should be able to:

Install the Apify connector in Claude Cowork and authenticate it
Run a competitor content scrape with cost approval built in
Analyze competitor posts by engagement-per-follower rather than raw likes
Schedule the scrape weekly so the database maintains itself

## Full Transcript

Eliot • 00:00
Should we talk about Apify connectors, Kelter?

Carter Jensen • 00:02
Let's do it. Let's do it. I do know we only have a few minutes, and so I want to make sure that we do talk a little bit about perplexity as well. I know that was a topic that.

Eliot • 00:12
We have power plays on Apify if we just want to i can send the power play out to people if you want to jump to perplexity computer.

Carter Jensen • 00:20
Yeah, we can, well, let's talk quickly about Appify. Just drop in the chat, would you guys like to hear about Appify? I would love to, dive into Apify and really talk about the power of Apify and what we've been building. And I think it's really important because really a lot of the social work that we have been tracking and monitoring, is, is is dialed in via Appify. So that is a little bit about that. So, Elliot, would you mind, let's run through Appify really quickly, and then I'll use the last few minutes to talk about Perplexity.

Eliot • 00:54
Absolutely. So, Amplify… Let me just switch screens is a connector that you can run and you have to be working in Claude desktop. Now I'm just going to open up their website to show you some of the power of it here. Apify is a scraping tool. And it essentially allows you to use over fifty thousand tools from Claude to scrape any information you want. So when you go… this looks a bit technical, but honestly, Claude has driven all of these, what they call, actors, which are essentially little apps and scripts that other people have built to go and scrape Pretty much anything you can think of. So, that could be Instagram, it could be LinkedIn, it can do Google Maps. You can see I actually ran earlier this week testing it out a bit more, this Google Maps email extractor. And basically. I said to Claude, I don't actually have the demo live.

In this Claude account, I don't think, but I can show you my connector. In my Claude account here, I've got Apify switched on. And then I told Claude from the chat to go and use the Apify connector to scrape Google Maps for 150 email addresses for businesses locally in Truro. And then… Once you connect the connector up, it just goes and uses it. It uses the Google Maps scraper. It uses the LinkedIn scraper. It can use the Instagram scraper. It can use 50,000 different tools to actually do this. And it went and it scraped Google Maps and it pulled all of these businesses that emails back to me and Claude. in a spreadsheet ready to actually go. And all of that cost me… It probably cost me about 20 cents, if that, to scrape 150 business business informations from Google Maps. I'm So it's incredibly powerful way of actually.

Getting pretty much any information you want on the web and pulling that into Claude to start working with. I know. Carter, Cal, you guys have been using it for some… for some more social media and marketing. Marketing use cases, is that right?

Carter Jensen • 03:07
Yeah, so the demo that we used yesterday was, you know, obviously one of the most important pieces of data that you can get is your Instagram data, what's working, what's not, and obviously data that others are doing in terms of your competitors. And so the example we ran through yesterday, and if you haven't installed Appify, it's a three-step process. You just add the connector and then authenticate your account. Super easy. But what this gives us are the tools to go off and actually find the competitors. And so, the competitors data. So I'm going to go ahead and just replace current share here quick, Elliot, so I can show you exactly how this worked. But with Apify, you know, we use this example from what was called ToxiFree. So this was an example that Cal used from yesterday. And we wanted to scrape and get an understanding of what were some of the types of topics that competitors were talking about successfully.

We wanted to go and figure out what were their competitors doing on Instagram? What was working? What were people reacting to? And how do we use that to actually fuel our content engine to actually get a jump start on Instagram? And so in normal Claude, without that connector, you can do these prompts, you can do this, but it doesn't actually have access to the actual posts, doesn't have access to the engagements. And this is where Apify comes into play. So we gave you a prompt. We basically run, says, hey, you're a social content strategist and you have access to Apify. Study accounts already winning in my niche, and build me a content plan modeled on what provably works. And then it says what, and it'll ask you what you sell, you run this in your marketing workspace, and it'll fill all this in for you.

So that prompt is in your notes. But what's gonna end up happening is it's gonna basically approve, it's gonna find the accounts that are closely related to your niche that it believes it should scrape, or you can add ones that are your known competitors. And then it basically says it's going to cost about 35 cents, and it lets you approve it. So we're going to say, let's go. And it took a couple of minutes, but it's actually going out using Appify as the MCP connector, going and scraping those accounts. And then here, what I did is I took basically the output. So the output here is, here's the content map, what it should be doing. And here are really some of the posts and different things that everyone else in my niche is actually talking about, but not only just posting what people are actually reacting to.

And so what I did is I basically said, great, that's all good, but I actually want this in a beautiful Notion database. And so what I did is I created a Notion database of really everything that it found. What are they talking about? What's being posted? And then here's the most important part. what is actually being engaged with, and it created this engagement-first-follower perspective, so I can sort this based on engagement-first-follower, and I can actually see what's going actually viral. Now, you might wonder, wait, how can you have over 198%? Or over 100% here? Well, when things go viral, they get shown on the For You page, and you don't necessarily need to be following the account So this then gives us the exact post of what's going on. We can jump into Instagram and actually see what that post is all about. and let that load.

Here it is. And… so it pulled the actual reel, and it was then brought into that database. Now, this is cool, this is fine, but what I've done is I've actually then scheduled this task. So I've said, hey, okay, I actually want you to go off and do this every single Monday morning. I want to keep a tab on my competitors. I want to actually understand what they are doing week over week, and create a database of everything that my competitors are doing. And so now, this is the weekly Instagram research, I just, at the end of that conversation, said, run this every… week, every Monday morning, 9am, I want you to run, and I want you to use the Appify connector to continue to make that dashboard better. And so with Appify, we now have the power to actually see into Instagram, we can see into TikTok, we can see into Facebook, and actually start pulling real-life competitor data, similar to the ad spy as it does with paid ads, we can actually start to understand and build our organic plans based on what we know is actually working with the audience that we're focused on.

And so that is the power of Apify, is it gives just us unlimited tools to find data in ways that we've never been able to do before because of these Apify actors.

## Full Transcript Eliot • 00:00 Should we talk about Apify connectors, Kelter? Carter Jensen • 00:02 Let's do it. Let's do it. I do know we only have a few minutes, and so I want to make sure that we do talk a little bit about perplexity as well. I know that was a topic that. Eliot • 00:12 We have power plays on Apify if we just want to i can send the power play out to people if you want to jump to perplexity computer. Carter Jensen • 00:20 Yeah, we can, well, let's talk quickly about Appify. Just drop in the chat, would you guys like to hear about Appify? I would love to, dive into Apify and really talk about the power of Apify and what we've been building. And I think it's really important because really a lot of the social work that we have been tracking and monitoring, is, is is dialed in via Appify. So that is a little bit about that. So, Elliot, would you mind, let's run through Appify really quickly, and then I'll use the last few minutes to talk about Perplexity. Eliot • 00:54 Absolutely. So, Amplify… Let me just switch screens is a connector that you can run and you have to be working in Claude desktop. Now I'm just going to open up their website to show you some of the power of it here. Apify is a scraping tool. And it essentially allows you to use over fifty thousand tools from Claude to scrape any information you want. So when you go… this looks a bit technical, but honestly, Claude has driven all of these, what they call, actors, which are essentially little apps and scripts that other people have built to go and scrape Pretty much anything you can think of. So, that could be Instagram, it could be LinkedIn, it can do Google Maps. You can see I actually ran earlier this week testing it out a bit more, this Google Maps email extractor. And basically. I said to Claude, I don't actually have the demo live. In this Claude account, I don't think, but I can show you my connector. In my Claude account here, I've got Apify switched on. And then I told Claude from the chat to go and use the Apify connector to scrape Google Maps for 150 email addresses for businesses locally in Truro. And then… Once you connect the connector up, it just goes and uses it. It uses the Google Maps scraper. It uses the LinkedIn scraper. It can use the Instagram scraper. It can use 50,000 different tools to actually do this. And it went and it scraped Google Maps and it pulled all of these businesses that emails back to me and Claude. in a spreadsheet ready to actually go. And all of that cost me… It probably cost me about 20 cents, if that, to scrape 150 business business informations from Google Maps. I'm So it's incredibly powerful way of actually. Getting pretty much any information you want on the web and pulling that into Claude to start working with. I know. Carter, Cal, you guys have been using it for some… for some more social media and marketing. Marketing use cases, is that right? Carter Jensen • 03:07 Yeah, so the demo that we used yesterday was, you know, obviously one of the most important pieces of data that you can get is your Instagram data, what's working, what's not, and obviously data that others are doing in terms of your competitors. And so the example we ran through yesterday, and if you haven't installed Appify, it's a three-step process. You just add the connector and then authenticate your account. Super easy. But what this gives us are the tools to go off and actually find the competitors. And so, the competitors data. So I'm going to go ahead and just replace current share here quick, Elliot, so I can show you exactly how this worked. But with Apify, you know, we use this example from what was called ToxiFree. So this was an example that Cal used from yesterday. And we wanted to scrape and get an understanding of what were some of the types of topics that competitors were talking about successfully. We wanted to go and figure out what were their competitors doing on Instagram? What was working? What were people reacting to? And how do we use that to actually fuel our content engine to actually get a jump start on Instagram? And so in normal Claude, without that connector, you can do these prompts, you can do this, but it doesn't actually have access to the actual posts, doesn't have access to the engagements. And this is where Apify comes into play. So we gave you a prompt. We basically run, says, hey, you're a social content strategist and you have access to Apify. Study accounts already winning in my niche, and build me a content plan modeled on what provably works. And then it says what, and it'll ask you what you sell, you run this in your marketing workspace, and it'll fill all this in for you. So that prompt is in your notes. But what's gonna end up happening is it's gonna basically approve, it's gonna find the accounts that are closely related to your niche that it believes it should scrape, or you can add ones that are your known competitors. And then it basically says it's going to cost about 35 cents, and it lets you approve it. So we're going to say, let's go. And it took a couple of minutes, but it's actually going out using Appify as the MCP connector, going and scraping those accounts. And then here, what I did is I took basically the output. So the output here is, here's the content map, what it should be doing. And here are really some of the posts and different things that everyone else in my niche is actually talking about, but not only just posting what people are actually reacting to. And so what I did is I basically said, great, that's all good, but I actually want this in a beautiful Notion database. And so what I did is I created a Notion database of really everything that it found. What are they talking about? What's being posted? And then here's the most important part. what is actually being engaged with, and it created this engagement-first-follower perspective, so I can sort this based on engagement-first-follower, and I can actually see what's going actually viral. Now, you might wonder, wait, how can you have over 198%? Or over 100% here? Well, when things go viral, they get shown on the For You page, and you don't necessarily need to be following the account So this then gives us the exact post of what's going on. We can jump into Instagram and actually see what that post is all about. and let that load. Here it is. And… so it pulled the actual reel, and it was then brought into that database. Now, this is cool, this is fine, but what I've done is I've actually then scheduled this task. So I've said, hey, okay, I actually want you to go off and do this every single Monday morning. I want to keep a tab on my competitors. I want to actually understand what they are doing week over week, and create a database of everything that my competitors are doing. And so now, this is the weekly Instagram research, I just, at the end of that conversation, said, run this every… week, every Monday morning, 9am, I want you to run, and I want you to use the Appify connector to continue to make that dashboard better. And so with Appify, we now have the power to actually see into Instagram, we can see into TikTok, we can see into Facebook, and actually start pulling real-life competitor data, similar to the ad spy as it does with paid ads, we can actually start to understand and build our organic plans based on what we know is actually working with the audience that we're focused on. And so that is the power of Apify, is it gives just us unlimited tools to find data in ways that we've never been able to do before because of these Apify actors.