# Apify vs Hack the SEO

Apify records 4,147,762 monthly visits with +3.9% month-over-month growth and Freemium, Contact for Pricing pricing. Hack the SEO records 4,063 monthly visits with -7.1% growth and Paid pricing.

| Metric | [Apify](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify) | [Hack the SEO](https://openaitools.app/tool/hack-the-seo) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.apify.com | https://hacktheseo.com |
| Categories | AI Web Scraping, AI Agent, AI API, AI Developer Tools | AI SEO Tools, SEO Writing AI, AI Blog Generator |
| Pricing Model | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Paid |
| Monthly Visits | 4,147,762 | 4,063 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +3.9% | -7.1% |
| Primary Market | United States | France |
| Direct Visits | 1,816,433 | 1,613 |
| Review Score | 4.6 | 4.2 |
| Saved Count | 6 | 0 |
| Supported Platforms | Website | Website |

## Apify

Apify started as a general-purpose web automation cloud and has grown into one of the largest marketplaces of turnkey web data extractors. The platform exposes a store of Actors — small containerized programs built by Apify and by third-party developers — that handle jobs like pulling Google Maps listings, TikTok videos, Instagram posts, Amazon prices, or crawling a documentation site into clean Markdown for a RAG pipeline. Each Actor runs on Apify's cloud, can be triggered from an API, scheduled on a recurring basis, and wired into downstream storage or applications.\n\nBecause running scrapers in production is mostly an infrastructure problem, Apify bundles the unglamorous parts: rotating residential and datacenter proxies, browser fingerprinting and anti-blocking, retry logic, dataset and key-value storage, and monitoring. Developers who would rather write their own code can build Actors with the Apify SDK in Python or JavaScript, or use Crawlee, Apify's open-source crawling and browser-automation library, which works with Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, and BeautifulSoup.\n\nRecently the platform has positioned itself around AI: the Apify MCP server and CLI let AI agents and assistants discover and call Actors as tools, and the Website Content Crawler Actor is explicitly designed to feed LLM applications and vector databases. Pricing follows a freemium model with monthly platform credits, pay-per-usage pricing for many Actors, and custom enterprise agreements.

**Pricing & Plans:** Freemium: a free plan with monthly usage credits, paid subscription tiers that scale credits and concurrency, consumption-based charges for many marketplace Actors, and custom enterprise pricing. Developer payouts are also available for published Actors.

- **Actor marketplace:** Over one hundred thousand ready-to-run scrapers and automation tools covering social media, maps, e-commerce, real estate, and general web crawling.
- **MCP server and CLI:** Connect Apify Actors directly to AI assistants and agents so they can search the store, run scrapers, and pull structured results as tool calls.
- **Anti-blocking and proxy infrastructure:** Managed proxy rotation and unblocking are built into the platform, so scrapers keep working when target sites add defenses.
- **Crawlee and the Apify SDK:** An open-source crawling library plus Python and JavaScript SDKs for building custom Actors with Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, or Cheerio.
- **Scheduling, storage, and integrations:** Recurring runs, dataset exports to CSV/JSON/Excel, webhooks, and integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Zapier, and thousands of apps.

**Strengths:** Enormous library of maintained scrapers means many jobs need no code at all; Infrastructure concerns like proxies, retries, and blocking are handled for you; Agent-ready through MCP, CLI, and API, with LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations; Generous free tier for testing plus a developer revenue-share program

**Limitations:** Costs scale with usage, so high-volume scraping can get expensive quickly; Quality varies between community-built Actors and first-party ones; Target sites change frequently, so some Actors break or need updating over time

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify.md)

## Hack the SEO

Hack the SEO began as an AI-assisted SEO tool for keyword research, content generation and competitor analysis. It now ships as a WordPress plugin that handles both classic SEO and GEO — getting cited inside AI answers, not just ranked on Google. The plugin runs a continuous audit across technical health, content, internal linking and structured data, presents issues ranked by impact, and turns each fix into a one-click action inside wp-admin.

The differentiator is the agentic workflow. Hack the SEO exposes your site, its plan and its numbers to Claude through an MCP connection, while keeping every call read-only by default and logged. Claude reviews your Search Console data and the weekly plan, proposes the work — titles, articles, internal links, fixes — and nothing changes on your pages until you approve it. Any applied action can be undone for 30 days, and changes are tested on a hidden copy before going live.

A separate module called AVA measures AI visibility: it asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google every night which brands they recommend and tells you where a competitor is cited instead of you. Two plans cover different levels of hands-on involvement — the self-serve plugin and a managed SEO GEO Pilot where the team runs the programme for you. It is aimed at freelancers, SMEs and agencies working on WordPress.

**Pricing & Plans:** Paid. The WordPress plugin costs €249 per month excluding VAT with no commitment. The managed SEO GEO Pilot service starts at €490 per month excluding VAT depending on your site. AVA AI-visibility tracking starts at €69 per month. VAT depends on country; no free tier is advertised.

- **Continuous audit with one-click fixes:** Technical, content, linking and schema issues are surfaced continuously, ranked by impact, and resolved with a single click inside WordPress.
- **Agentic workflow via Claude and MCP:** Claude reads your Search Console numbers and plan through an MCP connection, proposes the week's actions and applies them only after your approval — read-only by default, every call logged.
- **AVA AI visibility tracking:** A dedicated module asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google every night which brands they recommend and shows where a competitor is cited instead of you.
- **Topic clusters and internal linking:** The plugin groups content by topic, links related pages together in the right direction and surfaces cannibalization so one page owns each search.
- **Safety net: hidden tests, backups and undo:** Changes are tested on a copy hidden from Google, a verified backup is required, and every action can be rolled back for 30 days with a full log.

**Strengths:** Covers both classic Google SEO and GEO/AI-answer visibility in one WordPress plugin; Every action is approval-gated, logged and reversible for 30 days, with a verified backup requirement; Native Claude/MCP integration with read-only defaults keeps AI control in your hands; Written by published SEO authors, with a transparent line-by-line comparison of both plans

**Limitations:** Requires a WordPress site — no support for other CMS platforms; At €249 per month excluding VAT the plugin is priced for businesses, not hobby sites; Full pricing of the managed pilot depends on a sales call

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/hack-the-seo.md)

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do Apify and Hack the SEO compare in monthly traffic?

Apify has 4,147,762 monthly visits, while Hack the SEO has 4,063. Traffic estimates describe audience size, not product quality.

### How do their growth rates compare?

Apify has a month-over-month growth rate of +3.9%; Hack the SEO has -7.1%.

### How does pricing compare?

Apify: Freemium, Contact for Pricing. Freemium: a free plan with monthly usage credits, paid subscription tiers that scale credits and concurrency, consumption-based charges for many marketplace Actors, and custom enterprise pricing. Developer payouts are also available for published Actors. Hack the SEO: Paid. Paid. The WordPress plugin costs €249 per month excluding VAT with no commitment. The managed SEO GEO Pilot service starts at €490 per month excluding VAT depending on your site. AVA AI-visibility tracking starts at €69 per month. VAT depends on country; no free tier is advertised.

## Alternatives

| # | Tool Name | Monthly Visits | MoM Growth Rate | Pricing Model | Summary | Profile (Markdown) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| 1 | [n8n](https://openaitools.app/tool/n8n) | 4,522,449 | -7.4% | Freemium | Open-source workflow automation built for AI agents and technical teams | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/n8n.md) |
| 2 | [Firecrawl](https://openaitools.app/tool/firecrawl-dev) | 1,828,239 | -1.9% | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Provides direct LLM-ready markdown conversion via API, but lacks Apify's massive marketplace of pre-built scraping actors. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/firecrawl-dev.md) |
| 3 | [Clay](https://openaitools.app/tool/clay-2-0) | 1,267,465 | -2.7% | Freemium, Free Trial, Contact for Pricing | Build GTM systems that turn data into revenue | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/clay-2-0.md) |
| 4 | [Bright Data](https://openaitools.app/tool/bright-data) | 802,752 | -5.9% | Free Trial, Paid | Offers enterprise-grade proxy networks and raw web data infrastructure, but lacks Apify's plug-and-play actor marketplace. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/bright-data.md) |
| 5 | [Gumloop](https://openaitools.app/tool/gumloop) | 379,557 | -21.1% | Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing | Automates complex business workflows with AI agents, but is less specialized for raw large-scale web scraping actors. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/gumloop.md) |
| 6 | [PhantomBuster](https://openaitools.app/tool/phantombuster) | 279,012 | -10.1% | Freemium, Free Trial, Paid | Focuses heavily on pre-built social media automation and lead generation workflows rather than general web scraping. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/phantombuster.md) |
| 7 | [SEOmator](https://openaitools.app/tool/seomator) | 187,850 | +10.6% | Freemium, Paid | AI SEO manager that tracks rankings and AI answers, then does the work | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/seomator.md) |
| 8 | [Octoparse](https://openaitools.app/tool/octoparse) | 184,251 | +1.2% | Freemium, Free Trial, Paid, Contact for Pricing | Uses visual point-and-click scraping workflows instead of Apify's developer-centric actor ecosystem and cloud execution. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/octoparse.md) |
| 9 | [SEO.AI](https://openaitools.app/tool/seo-ai) | 152,848 | -2.7% | Free Trial, Paid | The AI SEO agent that researches, writes, publishes, and builds links for you | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/seo-ai.md) |
| 10 | [AISEO](https://openaitools.app/tool/aiseo) | 152,626 | +28.1% | Free Trial, Paid | AI SEO agents that rank on Google and get cited by AI chatbots | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/aiseo.md) |

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Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/apify-vs-hack-the-seo

More Markdown: [Categories](https://openaitools.app/categories.md) · [Traffic rankings](https://openaitools.app/rankings.md) · [llms.txt](https://openaitools.app/llms.txt)