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Playbook

Use Apify when you need controlled web automation/scraping workflows.
  • Use apify_list_store_actors first when you do not know the actor id yet.
  • Results are ranked by quality score by default. The top result is the most reliable actor based on rating, review count, total runs, and 30-day success rate. Pick the #1 result unless you have a specific reason not to.
  • Each actor in the response includes _qualityScore (higher is better), _baseQualityScore, and _successRate30d (percentage). Prefer actors with _deeplineVetted: true, high usage/rating, and _successRate30d >= 95%.
  • Do not route HarvestAPI-owned LinkedIn workflows through Apify. Prefer the native harvestapi_* provider operations for profiles, company employees, posts, comments, and reactions. For a LinkedIn shape the native provider does not expose, prefer supreme_coder/linkedin-post for generic post scraping. Avoid actors returned with _deeplineDownranked: true unless the user explicitly asked for that actor.
  • Build actorId as username/name from store results.
  • Use apify_get_actor_input_schema to inspect required/optional fields before running.
  • Wrapper-level fields (actorId, input, params, timeoutMs) and runtime validation behavior can differ from actor-page docs.
  • Prefer apify_run_actor_sync as the default execution path when you want results in one call.
  • Use apify_run_actor only when you need non-blocking execution, then poll run status before fetching outputs.
  • Validate payload shape with a tiny run before scaling row counts.
  • Deepline limits an organization to four unresolved Apify actor jobs by default. Additional calls receive a retryable Deepline capacity response before another billable actor run is launched; an explicit organization execution limit may override this guardrail.
  • A successful HTTP 200 with an empty dataset is reported as meta.resultOutcome.classification = "ambiguous_empty", not proof of a genuine no-result. Apify currently does not identify whether the input was attempted. Do not automatically retry that result: the first run remains billable and a retry may create a second charge.

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Quality ranking

Actors are ranked by:
Actors with less than 80% 30-day success rate are penalized. Actors with 0 reviews but high usage get a reduced fallback score. To bypass quality ranking and use Apify’s native sort, pass rankBy: "relevance".

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Examples