Analyze competitors across platforms with structured data

This skill analyzes competitor strategy, content, pricing, ads, and market positioning by selecting and running the right Apify Actor for the task across Google Maps, Booking.com, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, then summarizing the findings. It maps 28 named Actors to specific analysis needs: compass/crawler-google-places and compass/google-maps-extractor for location and business-detail benchmarking, compass/Google-Maps-Reviews-Scraper for review comparison, voyager/booking-scraper and voyager/booking-reviews-scraper for hotel competitor benchmarking, apify/facebook-ads-scraper for ad creative analysis, apify/facebook-pages-scraper for page performance, apify/instagram-profile-scraper and apify/instagram-post-scraper for profile and content monitoring, streamers/youtube-channel-scraper for channel metrics, and clockworks/tiktok-scraper for TikTok competitor data, among others.

Use it when you need competitor benchmarks for content, reviews, pricing, ads, audience, or channel performance, when the task involves selecting Apify Actors to compare competitors across maps, booking, social, or video platforms, or when you need structured competitor data plus synthesized takeaways for strategy or positioning rather than raw scraped rows.

Requires an .env file with APIFY_TOKEN, Node.js 20.6+ for native --env-file support, and the mcpc CLI (npm install -g @apify/mcpc). The workflow tracks five steps: identify the right Actor from the mapping table; fetch its input schema dynamically via mcpc ... tools-call fetch-actor-details actor:="ACTOR_ID"; ask the user for output format, a quick chat answer with no file, a full CSV export, or a full JSON export, and how many results to pull; run it with:

node --env-file=.env ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/reference/scripts/run_actor.js \
  --actor "ACTOR_ID" \
  --input 'JSON_INPUT'

adding --output and --format csv or --format json for file exports; then report the number of competitors analyzed, the output file location, key competitive insights, and suggested next steps such as deeper benchmarking. Named error cases include a missing APIFY_TOKEN (ask the user to create .env), a missing mcpc install, a misspelled Actor ID, a failed run (check the Apify console link in the error output), and timeouts (reduce input size or raise --timeout).

Built entirely on Apify Actors accessed through the mcpc CLI and Apify's MCP endpoint (mcp.apify.com), spanning Google Maps and Booking.com scrapers alongside Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok scrapers rather than a single unified competitor-intelligence API.

Marketers, growth teams, and hospitality or local-business analysts who need structured competitor data across maps, bookings, and social/video platforms without hand-picking and configuring each Apify Actor and its input schema themselves, and who want the same five-step checklist (identify Actor, fetch schema, confirm preferences, run, summarize) across every platform.