The Scenario
You've been asked to evaluate Apify as the team's primary scraping infrastructure. Before any commitment, you need a comparison table of the best-available Actors for the three platforms you scrape most: LinkedIn, Amazon, and TripAdvisor. Actor name, success rate, pricing, and the Apify Store URL — one row per Actor, top three per platform.
You open the Apify Store, find the LinkedIn Actor category, and there are 47 results. No standardized sort by real-world success rate. The pricing is per-dataset-item for some and per-run for others. Amazon has 31 results. TripAdvisor has 22.
This comparison was supposed to take an hour. It's looking like a day.
The bad version:
- Click through each platform category in the Apify Store, open each Actor listing individually, note the name, rating, pricing model, and URL.
- Build the comparison table in the sheet row by row, alt-tabbing between Apify Store tabs and the spreadsheet.
- Realize that "success rate" is not consistently shown on all listings and you need to go back through the ones you skipped.
The evaluation summary is going to the infrastructure lead this afternoon. You're still on page one of LinkedIn results.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet. It reads your data and, through its built-in Apify MCP integration, can search the Apify Store programmatically and write Actor metadata — name, rating, pricing, URL — directly into your sheet.
Search the Apify Store for scrapers for LinkedIn, Amazon, and TripAdvisor using Apify. For each platform, list the top 3 Actors by rating and fill columns A through D with platform name, Actor name, star rating, and Apify Store URL.
What You Get
- One row per Actor across nine total rows (three platforms × three top results).
- Column A: platform (LinkedIn, Amazon, TripAdvisor).
- Column B: Actor name as listed in the Apify Store.
- Column C: star rating or success percentage.
- Column D: direct Apify Store URL for the Actor.
- Results written in one pass — no manual browsing, no alt-tab between store and sheet.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You also need pricing model alongside ratings
Search the Apify Store for the top 5 Actors for LinkedIn, Amazon, and TripAdvisor using Apify. Write platform, Actor name, rating, pricing model (per run or per item), and Store URL into columns A through E.
You want to filter by a specific tag or category
Find all Apify Actors tagged 'real-estate' in the Apify Store. Write their names, success rates, and Apify Store URLs into columns A, B, and C of my sheet. Sort by success rate descending.
Some platforms have both free and paid Actors and you need them separated
Search the Apify Store for Actors covering LinkedIn, Amazon, and Instagram. Separate free and paid Actors into two groups in my sheet — write free Actors to columns A through C and paid Actors to columns E through G. Include Actor name, rating, and pricing in each group.
Full Actor evaluation table in one shot
Search the Apify Store for the top 5 Actors each for LinkedIn, Amazon, TripAdvisor, and Instagram using Apify. For each Actor write: platform (column A), Actor name (column B), star rating (column C), pricing model (column D), number of users (column E if shown), and Apify Store URL (column F). Flag any Actor with a rating below 4.0 as "low rating" in column G. Produce one row per Actor with platforms grouped together.
When you include the flag logic in the prompt, the table arrives ready to share — not ready for a second pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet where you're building an Apify Actor comparison, then ask it to search the Apify Store and populate the results directly into your rows. You might also find the spoke on running a specific Apify Actor and importing its full dataset useful, or browse the Apify MCP overview for all covered workflows.