Apify Agent Skills

Apify Agent Skills is the official Agent Skills pack from Apify — five skills plus a commands pack that let an AI coding agent scrape the major social, search, maps, and review platforms through Actors, then build, actorize, and deploy Actors of its own.

What is Apify?

Apify is a marketplace and serverless runtime for web scraping and automation. Its unit of work is the Actor — a containerised cloud program with a declared input schema and structured dataset output. The Apify Store hosts more than 30,000 of them, maintained by Apify itself or the community, and each one absorbs the maintenance burden that breaks hand-rolled scrapers: proxy rotation, login walls, layout changes, and rate limits.

The five skills

• apify-ultimate-scraper — the universal scraper. It ships a flat Actor index of 130 curated Actors across 14 categories, so the agent picks a known-good Actor instead of guessing: 20 for LinkedIn, 16 for Facebook, 13 each for Instagram and TikTok, 10 for real estate and hospitality, 8 each for cross-platform reviews and web crawling, 7 each for YouTube and Google Maps, 6 SEO tools, 5 each for X/Twitter and contact enrichment, 3 for Google Search and Trends, plus 9 others. Every entry is tiered apify (always preferred) or community (gap filler), and anything not in the index falls back to a search across the full Apify Store.
• apify-actor-development — create, debug, and deploy Actors from scratch in JavaScript, TypeScript, or Python, with bundled references for actor.json, input schema, output schema, dataset schema, key-value store schema, logging, and standby mode.
• apify-actorization — wrap existing code as an Actor, covering the JS/TS SDK, the Python async context manager, and a generic CLI wrapper for any other language.
• apify-generate-output-schema — derive dataset_schema.json, output_schema.json, and key_value_store_schema.json by reading an Actor's own source.
• apify-sdk-integration — call Actors from an existing JavaScript/TypeScript or Python application through apify-client, covering sync and async execution, dataset and key-value store retrieval, error handling, and the REST fallback for other languages.

Alongside them, the apify-actor-commands pack adds slash commands such as /create-actor for guided scaffolding.

Fourteen workflow guides

The scraper skill loads a matching playbook when a task spans multiple steps: lead generation, contact enrichment, company research, competitive intel, brand monitoring, review analysis, social media analytics, influencer vetting, trend research, content and SEO, ecommerce price monitoring, real estate and hospitality, job market and recruitment, and knowledge base and RAG ingestion.

Cost discipline built in

Apify Actors bill per result or per event, so the scraper ships a gotchas.md covering pricing models, a cost estimation protocol to run before a large job, common pitfalls, error recovery, platform-specific rate limits, and a straight argument for when Actors beat raw HTTP scraping. It also fixes three CLI habits that otherwise break automation: always pass --json for output stable across CLI versions, always redirect stderr with 2>/dev/null because progress messages corrupt JSON parsing, and pass --user-agent apify-agent-skills/apify-ultimate-scraper so runs are attributed to the skill.

Who it is for

Growth, research, and data teams who want an agent that can actually pull structured data off Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Maps, Amazon, or Booking.com — and developers packaging their own scrapers as deployable, billable Actors.

What you can build

Ranked lead lists from Google Maps and enriched with owner emails, competitive sweeps across pricing pages and G2 reviews, brand sentiment reports from 30 days of social mentions, influencer shortlists ranked by engagement-to-follower ratio, price-monitoring pipelines across Amazon and Walmart, AI-search visibility checks, and RAG knowledge bases ingested from crawled sites.

Why it matters

Scraping breaks constantly, and an agent writing its own fetch loop will hit a login wall, a rendered-JS shell, or a rate limit and quietly return partial data. Routing through maintained Actors moves that problem to someone whose job it is to fix it — and pinning the agent to a curated index of 130 known-good Actors keeps it from picking a stale community port of the one it needed.

Option 1 — skills CLI

Install the scraper on its own:

npx skills add https://github.com/apify/agent-skills --skill apify-ultimate-scraper

Option 2 — Claude Code plugin

The repository is its own plugin marketplace, and each skill installs separately:

/plugin marketplace add https://github.com/apify/agent-skills
/plugin install apify-ultimate-scraper@apify-agent-skills
/plugin install apify-actor-development@apify-agent-skills
/plugin install apify-actorization@apify-agent-skills
/plugin install apify-generate-output-schema@apify-agent-skills
/plugin install apify-sdk-integration@apify-agent-skills

Cursor and Windsurf read the same plugin format.

Option 3 — Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, or any Markdown-reading agent

The repo ships agents/AGENTS.md as a one-page auto-generated index of every skill, and gemini-extension.json so Gemini CLI auto-discovers it. Clone and point your agent at it:

git clone https://github.com/apify/agent-skills

Otherwise reference skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md directly.

Set up the Apify CLI

npm install -g apify-cli     # or: brew install apify-cli
apify login                  # OAuth in your browser — the recommended path

For headless or CI environments where no browser is available, generate a token in Apify Console under Integrations and set it instead:

export APIFY_TOKEN="your-token-here"

The CLI picks up APIFY_TOKEN from the environment or a .env file automatically. The Ultimate Scraper skill needs Apify CLI v1.5.0 or newer and Node.js 20.6+.

Use it

Describe the outcome and let the skill choose the Actor:

Find Italian restaurants in Brooklyn rated under 4 stars on Google Maps, scrape their reviews, crawl their sites for owner emails, and export a ranked CSV.

The skill reads its Actor index to pick the right Actor, loads the matching workflow guide for multi-step jobs, shapes the input, manages the run, and formats the results.

Optional — hosted MCP

mcp.apify.com generates a one-line MCP URL exposing the Actors you choose as tools, for any MCP-compatible client.