Topic desk 05
Data operations
The operational half of web data: choosing Actors, calling APIs, validating datasets, managing crawler access, and delivering results reliably in production.
Most web data problems in production are not extraction problems. The scrape usually works; what fails is everything around it — a run that returns zero rows and reports success, a schema change that reaches a dashboard before anyone notices, a retry that silently doubles a dataset. The guides in this cluster cover that operational layer: designing Actor input you can validate, handling asynchronous runs and their failure states, and building quality gates that check the result rather than the response code. Crawler access sits here too, since how AI and search crawlers read a site now determines whether published work is reachable at all. The recurring principle is simple and repeatedly expensive to ignore: verify at the destination, never at the caller.
Operations guide 10 · 7 min read
Keyword Ranking API Pricing: 8 Vendors per 1,000 Queries
Eight keyword ranking APIs normalised to one number: cost per 1,000 queries, measured from their own published tiers on 2026-09-04, plus which have no monthly minimum.
Operations guide 09 · 8 min read
Keyword Search Volume API: What You Can Actually Get
There is no official Google search volume API. What keyword data you can get programmatically, what the numbers mean, and when relative interest answers the question.
Operations guide 08 · 8 min read
From Actor Run to Google Sheets and Slack: Wiring Web Data Into Daily Work
How to turn a scheduled Actor run into a working alert and archive pipeline: dataset exports, no-code automation nodes, digest design, and the deduplication that keeps alerts trustworthy.
Field note 05 · 8 min read
How to Give an AI Agent Live Web Data
A practical guide to wiring real-time web data into AI agents: choosing tools over scrapers, designing the data contract an LLM can reason about, and controlling cost and failure.
Operations guide 07 · 7 min read
Google Trends Data as an API: Programmatic Keyword Research Without the Export Button
How to turn Google Trends into a repeatable data feed for SEO and market research: batching keyword comparisons, reading interest timelines, and mining rising queries at scale.
Field note 02 · 8 min read
How AI Crawlers Read Websites: HTML, Robots, and Retrieval Access
A technical guide to the crawler roles, HTML requirements, robots controls, redirects, and CDN settings that determine whether AI search can retrieve a site.
Field note 04 · 8 min read
How to Choose an Apify Actor for a Production Data Workflow
A source-first method for comparing Apify Actors by entity, geography, schema, freshness, pricing, limits, and a real sample run before scaling.
Operations guide 05 · 11 min read
How to Run an Apify Actor by API in a Production Application
A production integration pattern for Actor input, asynchronous runs, status handling, datasets, secrets, retries, idempotency, and observable delivery.
Operations guide 06 · 10 min read
How to Validate Scraped Data Quality Before It Reaches Production
A reusable quality gate for scraped datasets covering source evidence, completeness, validity, duplicates, freshness, drift, anomalies, and manual review.
Field note 01 · 9 min read
SEO and GEO for Data API Pages: A 2026 Field Guide
A practical framework for making data API and Apify Actor pages crawlable, useful, quotable, and easy to select in both search engines and AI answers.
Field note 03 · 10 min read
What Improves AI Citations? An Evidence-First Content Playbook
A measured guide to citation-ready writing: direct answers, sources, statistics, topical coverage, freshness, and the tactics that should not drive a content strategy.
The product layer
Find the matching live contract.
Filter the AgentX and TrueFetch directory, open the current Actor page, and prove a narrow sample before scaling.