Apify Actors

Apify Actors starts one of the robots in your Apify account, called Actors, and returns the data it collects. The Apify store has robots that read the content of a whole website, pull the products from an online store, gather reviews or social media posts, and many other tasks.

Use it when you need data from web pages that cannot be read from a single address, or when you want to go through many pages of a site in one go.

When to use it

• Collect the text of every page on your company’s website so an agent can answer questions about it.
• Keep an eye on competitors’ product prices.
• Gather the reviews of your business published on different sites.
• Give an agent the ability to look things up on the web when it needs to.

Configuration

You need an Apify credential with your Apify account token. See Credentials.

Field	What it does
Credential (required)	The Apify credential.
Actor (required)	The name of the Apify robot you want to run, as shown in the Apify store. Default: apify/website-content-crawler, which reads the content of a website.
Run input (required)	The robot’s settings, in the format described on its page in the Apify store. By default it holds an example for apify/website-content-crawler with the address to start from.
Output fields	The values you want to keep from each result, separated by commas, for example text, url. For a value nested inside another, use a dot: metadata.title. Leave it empty to get everything.
Flatten output	When on, nested values move to the top level: metadata.title becomes metadata_title. This makes them easier to use in the next components. Off by default.

Output

The component has two outputs:

• Output: the list of results the robot collected, one per item (for example, one per page read or per product found).
• Tool: turns the robot into a tool an agent can use. The agent decides when to run it and with which settings, following the robot’s description in Apify.

Example

A training academy wants an assistant that answers questions about its courses from its website.

1. Add Apify Actors and choose your Apify credential.
2. Leave Actor as apify/website-content-crawler.
3. In Run input, replace the example address with the academy’s website.
4. In Output fields, enter text, url to keep each page’s text and address.
5. Connect the Output output to the component that stores the texts in a knowledge base, and use that base from the assistant.

Good practices

• Each run uses credit from your Apify account. Limit in Run input how many pages the robot should go through.
• Use Output fields to keep only what you need: some robots return very large results.
• Try the robot’s settings on the Apify website first and, once they work, copy them into Run input.