apiify

Apiify Skills

Apiify is an agent skill/plugin for turning websites into callable APIs. It guides Claude Code or Codex through API discovery, browser-assisted capture, deterministic script generation, verification, and JSON/CSV export.

The core product idea is simple: pay the browser/LLM cost once during discovery, then run a deterministic script forever.

Why This Exists

Agents are much better when they can call tools than when they have to manually drive browsers.

Browser work is useful for discovery, login, and messy workflows, but it is a bad runtime primitive:

• it is slow and expensive;
• it breaks when UI text or layout changes;
• it burns context on screenshots, DOM, and retries;
• it repeats the same exploration every time;
• it is hard to compose into larger agent workflows.

APIs are the opposite: structured, cheap, callable, testable, and easy for agents to chain. The problem is that many useful websites either do not expose a public API, hide their data behind private browser calls, or require enough technical work that non-technical users cannot turn the workflow into a tool.

Apiify bridges that gap. It helps an agent ask the right questions, research the public/private API surface, use a browser only when needed, and produce a script that another agent can call like a normal API.

The Agent Workflow Shift

Without Apiify:

agent -> open browser -> login -> click/search/filter -> scrape page -> retry on failure

With Apiify:

one-time discovery -> generated script/API -> agent calls the script directly

That matters because once a workflow is converted into a deterministic script, it becomes a reusable capability. Any agent can call it, schedule it, combine it with other tools, export it to CSV, or wrap it as an endpoint.

Use Cases

Apiify is useful when a person can get the data or complete the workflow in a browser, but there is no clean API available to the agent.

Common examples:

• Lead generation: build local business lists, startup lists, hiring-signal feeds, public-company account profiles, or ecommerce catalog monitors.
• Sales triggers: watch public job boards, RSS feeds, sitemaps, product feeds, and market discussions for new pain or budget signals.
• Marketing intelligence: monitor competitor content, launch reactions, product pages, pricing pages, and visible website stack signals.
• News and market monitoring: turn public RSS feeds, public search APIs, and public content feeds into structured alert rows.
• Logged-in sales/admin portals: convert repeatable CRM, analytics, marketplace, or dashboard workflows into scripts agents can call.
• Prototype integrations before official API access: reverse engineer enough of the browser flow to validate a product idea or automation before building a full integration.
• Reduce agent runtime cost: replace repeated browser navigation with a cheap deterministic HTTP call or script execution.

Example prompts:

/apiify:apiify turn this real estate search page into a JSON/CSV extractor for price, address, agent, and listing URL.

Use $apiify:apiify to convert this logged-in analytics dashboard export into a reusable script. Browser login once, then replay the underlying API if possible.

/apiify:apiify find the API behind this product search page and generate a script that accepts --query and --limit.

Business-focused no-key example catalog:

Example	Business job	Typical source
openstreetmap-local-leads	Local business prospect lists	Nominatim/OpenStreetMap
public-site-technographics	Visible stack/account scoring	Public HTML + headers
hacker-news-market-mentions	Founder/technical market signals	HN Algolia search
rss-feed-monitor	Company blog, press, and industry monitoring	Public RSS/Atom feeds
lever-hiring-signals	Hiring intent and growth triggers	Lever public postings
greenhouse-hiring-signals	Hiring intent and growth triggers	Greenhouse Job Board API
sec-company-facts	Public-company account research	SEC EDGAR data APIs
shopify-product-feed-monitor	Ecommerce competitor catalog/pricing	Public storefront product feeds
wordpress-content-monitor	Competitor blog/content monitoring	WordPress REST posts
sitemap-content-inventory	Competitor SEO/content inventory	Public XML sitemaps

The catalog validator rejects examples that require API keys, bearer tokens, or OAuth credentials. For live source checks, run:

python3 plugins/apiify/skills/apiify/scripts/smoke_no_key_examples.py

See plugins/apiify/examples/yc-company-leads/ for a real directory-to-lead-list example. It turns YC's public company directory into a JSON/CSV extractor by discovering the underlying Algolia search API, with optional public profile enrichment for founder/social fields.

When Not To Use It