Apify MCP Server

Apify MCP server

Connect your agent to the largest marketplace of tools for AI.

The official Apify Model Context Protocol (MCP) server gives AI agents web scraping, data extraction, and browser automation through thousands of ready-made Actors from Apify Store, at https://mcp.apify.com.

Apify is the marketplace of ready-to-run tools for AI agents. One connection to the Apify MCP server gives your agent thousands of tools to choose from, for jobs like web fetch, SERP monitoring, lead generation and enrichment, and pulling data from e-commerce sites and social media. The server loads only what each task needs.

Your agent searches Apify Store, checks an Actor's input and pricing, runs it, and reads the structured results, so you don't install a separate MCP server for every site. Connect to the hosted server with OAuth, or run it locally over stdio with the @apify/actors-mcp-server npm package.

Contents

• Quickstart
• Set up your client
• Remote (hosted) or local MCP server
• How an agent uses Apify Actors
• Tools, resources, and prompts
• Choose which tools load
• UI mode configuration
• Example prompts
• Pricing and limits
• Telemetry
• Troubleshooting and limitations
• FAQ
• Development
• Contributing
• Privacy and license
• Learn more

🚀 Quickstart

1. Open the MCP configurator, pick your client, and choose the tools you want.
2. Copy the generated configuration, deeplink, or command into your client.
3. Sign in to Apify in the browser window that opens. If you don't have an account, you can create a free one there.

The hosted endpoint is https://mcp.apify.com. If your client can't use OAuth, send your Apify API token in an Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_TOKEN> header instead. Treat the token like a password and keep it out of repositories.

Using a coding agent such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot? An official Apify plugin installs this MCP server together with Apify agent skills in one step.

🤖 Set up your client

The configurator generates the exact setup for each supported client, including Claude Code, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, Claude, Claude Desktop, Codex, OpenCode, Kiro, and more. The snippets below cover the most common cases.

claude mcp add apify "https://mcp.apify.com" -t http

apify mcp install cursor

{
  "servers": {
    "apify": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com"
    }
  }
}

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com"
    }
  }
}

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "actors-mcp-server": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@apify/actors-mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "APIFY_TOKEN": "YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN"
      }
    }
  }
}

The server is also listed in the Docker MCP catalog, and each release ships an MCP bundle file (apify-mcp-server.mcpb) for one-click installation in clients that support it.

Remote (hosted) or local MCP server

The hosted remote MCP server with OAuth is the recommended option. Use the local server when you want to run the MCP process on your own machine; Actors still run and store their results on the Apify platform in both modes. If your client supports only stdio, you can also bridge it to the hosted server with mcp-remote: npx mcp-remote https://mcp.apify.com.

How an agent uses Apify Actors

Actors are serverless programs on the Apify platform. Each one does a specific job, like scraping Google Maps, crawling a website for RAG, or collecting social media posts. The MCP server turns Actors into tools an agent can find and call without you configuring each one in advance.

A typical task follows four steps:

1. search-actors finds candidate Actors in Apify Store for the task.
2. fetch-actor-details returns the Actor's input schema, README, and pricing, plus its output schema on request.
3. call-actor starts the run and waits for it to finish, 30 seconds by default and up to 45. It returns the run status and storage IDs; the scraped items stay in the run's dataset.
4. get-dataset-items reads the results from the run's dataset, with limit and offset for pagination.

The server adds get-dataset-items, get-key-value-store-record, get-actor-run, and abort-actor-run whenever call-actor or an Actor tool is loaded, so the agent can always read results and check on long runs that outlast the wait.

You can also expose a specific Actor as its own tool, for example apify/instagram-scraper. The server builds the tool's parameters from the Actor's input schema, so the agent knows exactly what to pass. A Server Actor with an API schema, such as apify/web-fetch, apify/web-search, or apify/rag-web-browser, gets a tool that sends one HTTP request to its API instead.

Actors that run their own MCP server. Some Actors are MCP servers themselves. fetch-actor-mcp-tool-list lists their tools, and call-actor-mcp-tool calls one. When such an Actor is loaded as a tool source and has no API schema, its tools are exposed under names in the form username--actor-name--tool-name; an Actor with an API schema, such as apify/web-search, gets its server tool instead, and call-actor-mcp-tool reaches its MCP tools. Apify Store also lists MCP-related Actors from independent creators; those are separate products with their own READMEs and pricing.

🛠️ Tools, resources, and prompts

Any Actor can be a tool, and agents discover new ones as they work. By default, the server loads the actors and docs categories, two Actor tools (Web Search and Web Fetch), and report-problem. Everything else is opt-in by category or by tool name.

Helper tools

Besides Actor tools, the server provides helper tools for the Apify platform:

• Actors: search Apify Store, list the Actors in your account, view their details, call tools on Actors that run MCP servers, send requests to Server Actors, and delete your own Actors.
• Documentation: search the Apify and Crawlee docs and fetch pages as context.
• Runs and storage: list runs, inspect them, read their logs, and read datasets and key-value stores.
• Tasks and schedules: manage saved Actor tasks and their public landing pages, and schedules that run Actors and tasks automatically.
• Builds and versions: build Actors, read build logs, and create, read, change, copy, and delete versions from files.
• Apify API: search the API reference, inspect an operation, and send requests to read or change data.

Available tools

Legend for the Enabled by default column:

• ✅ In the default tool set.
• ⚡ Added automatically when call-actor, an Actor tool, or get-actor-run is loaded, which is true in the default configuration.
• ✅¹ Served by default only when telemetry is on and the client name doesn't contain claude, anthropic, or local-agent-mode. Select it explicitly with tools=report-problem or tools=dev to serve it to any client; telemetry still has to be on.

The tasks category manages saved Actor tasks. It is unrelated to the MCP Tasks protocol. The tool reference has full descriptions of each tool.

Tool annotations

Every tool carries a title, a readOnlyHint, and an openWorldHint. readOnlyHint is true for tools that only read data. Actor tools get it only for Apify-maintained Actors with limited permissions and no inputs that accept secrets, writable storage, an MCP connector, or code; other Actor tools are marked destructive. openWorldHint is true for tools that reach outside the Apify platform, such as call-actor, and false for platform-only tools.

Prompts and resources

No prompts are registered yet, so prompts/list returns an empty list. resources/read accepts any Apify API GET URL (https://api.apify.com/v2/...) and returns the response body using the session's Apify token, inlined up to 256 KB. Your data isn't enumerated in resources/list; resources/templates/list lists the common shapes with their paging parameters.

Choose which tools load

The tools parameter takes categories, tool names, and Actor names, separated by commas. When you set it, the defaults are dropped and only what you list is loaded, plus the ⚡ run and storage tools whenever the list includes call-actor or an Actor. The easiest way to build a selection is the configurator.

Hosted server:

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=actors,docs,apify/web-search,apify/web-fetch

Local server:

npx @apify/actors-mcp-server --tools actors,docs,apify/web-search,apify/web-fetch

To give an agent a single Actor, list only that Actor. The agent gets its tool plus the four ⚡ tools it needs to read the results:

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=apify/instagram-scraper

Pin your tools in production. The default tool set can change between versions. Set tools explicitly if you need a stable interface.

UI mode configuration

The ui parameter controls MCP Apps widget tools. With UI mode on, the server adds search-actors-widget and fetch-actor-details-widget next to their base tools, which keep returning standard responses. By default (auto), UI mode turns on when the client supports MCP Apps.

Hosted server:

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=actors,docs&ui=true

Local server, with a CLI flag or the UI_MODE environment variable:

npx @apify/actors-mcp-server --ui true
UI_MODE=true npx @apify/actors-mcp-server

💬 Example prompts

Ask in plain language. The agent finds a suitable Actor, checks its input and pricing, runs it, and reads the results. These prompts cover the most common jobs:

Follow-ups work too. "Show me the next 10 results from that run" makes the agent call get-dataset-items again with a higher offset. With the schedules category loaded, "Run that Google Maps search every Monday at 9 am" creates a schedule.

💰 Pricing and limits

• Connecting to the MCP server is free. Actor runs bill to your Apify account according to each Actor's pricing, which fetch-actor-details shows before a run. The Apify free plan includes $5 of monthly platform usage.
• To cap what a run can cost, pass maxTotalChargeUsd (pay-per-event Actors) or maxItems (pay-per-result Actors) in the callOptions of call-actor. timeout and memory limit the run's duration and memory, not its price.
• The hosted server accepts up to 20 requests per second per account.
• search-actors returns only free and pay-per-event Actors that pass the platform's agent-safety filters, so rental and pay-per-result Actors don't appear in search. Full-permission Actors need your one-time approval; until then, call-actor returns an error with an approval link.
• Some tools work without an Apify account: search-actors, fetch-actor-details, search-apify-docs, fetch-apify-docs, apify-api-search, and apify-api-details. Select only those, for example https://mcp.apify.com?tools=search-actors, and the hosted server accepts the connection without a token.

🪙 Agentic payments (experimental). Agents can pay for Actor runs without an Apify account. AGI sells a prepaid, spend-capped Apify API token for an x402, MPP, or Skyfire payment. The agent then uses it as a normal Bearer token against mcp.apify.com, with any Actor. See the agentic payments documentation for supported methods and limits, and agi.apify.com/AGENTS.md for protocol details.

📡 Telemetry

The Apify MCP server collects telemetry about tool calls to help Apify understand usage patterns and improve the service. Telemetry is on by default. With telemetry on, Actor searches in Apify Store send the MCP session ID as _traceId

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