Sessionize Speakers Directory Scraper

Extracts speaker name, tagline, company, bio, topics, sessions, past and upcoming events, and social links from public Sessionize speaker profiles. Start from a directory category, a search term, a custom speaker list, or individual profile URLs.

What you get

• One structured record per public Sessionize speaker profile: who they are, what they talk about, where they've spoken, and where to find them online.
• Topic tags, Sessionize expertise categories, and badges (e.g. Java Champion, Oracle ACE, Most Active Speaker) for filtering thought leaders by field.
• The speaker's full event history as listed on their profile, with dates, locations, and an upcoming flag. Useful for sizing how active a speaker is.
• Pay per result: one result event per speaker profile saved to the dataset.
• Runs on Apify's infrastructure with retries and proxy support.

Built for conference and meetup organizers sourcing speakers for a track, and sponsorship, DevRel, and marketing agencies researching industry voices by topic.

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
startUrls	array of URLs	one of startUrls/searchQuery	Sessionize speakers directory categories, directory search URLs, custom speaker lists, or individual speaker profiles.
searchQuery	string	one of startUrls/searchQuery	Searches the speakers directory by name, topic, language, or location (max 40 characters). Used in addition to any start URLs.
maxResults	integer	no (default 100)	Stops the run once this many speaker profiles have been produced.

Supported start URL shapes:

• Directory category: https://sessionize.com/speakers-directory/information-communications-technology
• Directory search (you can also paste a URL after filtering on the site): https://sessionize.com/speakers-directory?q=kubernetes
• Custom speaker list: https://sessionize.com/oracle-aces, https://sessionize.com/microsoft-solutions-women-in-tech-speakers
• Single speaker profile: https://sessionize.com/<speaker-username>

Example input:

{
    "startUrls": [
        { "url": "https://sessionize.com/speakers-directory/information-communications-technology" },
        { "url": "https://sessionize.com/oracle-aces" }
    ],
    "searchQuery": "kubernetes",
    "maxResults": 100
}

Output example

An invented record in the exact shape the Actor emits. The topics, sessions, and events arrays are shortened here for readability; the dataset contains every entry shown on the profile.

{
    "name": "Dana Okonkwo",
    "tagline": "Platform Engineer @ Northwind Systems",
    "company": "Northwind Systems",
    "companyUrl": "https://example.com/",
    "location": "Leeds, United Kingdom",
    "bio": "Dana Okonkwo builds developer platforms at Northwind Systems and has spent a decade on Kubernetes, CI pipelines, and the human side of on-call. Dana writes about platform teams that stay small. ...",
    "areasOfExpertise": ["Information & Communications Technology"],
    "topics": ["Kubernetes", "Platform Engineering", "CI/CD", "Observability", "On-call"],
    "badges": ["Most Active Speaker 2025"],
    "linkedinUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/example-profile/",
    "twitterUrl": null,
    "blueskyUrl": "https://bsky.app/profile/example.invalid",
    "githubUrl": "https://github.com/example-user",
    "youtubeUrl": null,
    "blogUrl": "https://example.com/blog",
    "links": [
        { "label": "LinkedIn", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/example-profile/" },
        { "label": "Blog", "url": "https://example.com/blog" },
        { "label": "Company", "url": "https://example.com/" }
    ],
    "sessionCount": 9,
    "sessions": [
        {
            "title": "Your Platform Team Is Too Big",
            "url": "https://sessionize.com/s/example-speaker/your-platform-team-is-too-big/100000",
            "languages": []
        }
    ],
    "eventCount": 14,
    "events": [
        {
            "name": "Northern Platform Days 2025",
            "url": "https://example.com/events/npd-2025",
            "date": "June 2025",
            "location": "Manchester, United Kingdom",
            "isSessionizeEvent": true,
            "isUpcoming": false
        }
    ],
    "url": "https://sessionize.com/example-speaker",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-09-15T19:07:27.419Z"
}

Every dataset item has the same shape. Download results as JSON, CSV, Excel, or via the Apify API.

Field notes

• company is parsed from the tagline (the text after "at" or "@"). Sessionize has no structured employer field, so it is null when the tagline doesn't name one and can be wrong for unusual taglines. companyUrl is whatever the speaker linked as "Company" and may not match the tagline.
• twitterUrl, linkedinUrl, blueskyUrl, githubUrl, youtubeUrl, and blogUrl are convenience columns picked from links. links keeps every link with the speaker's own label.
• events lists everything on the profile, past and upcoming, including events not run on Sessionize (isSessionizeEvent: false).
• Multi-language profiles: tagline and bio use the English version when one exists. sessions includes talks in all languages.

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing. You are charged only for the result event, once per speaker profile saved to the dataset, up to maxResults. The per-event price is shown on the Actor's Store page before you run it.

Event	When it's charged
result	Once per extracted speaker profile, up to maxResults

Why this actor

Sessionize says 85,000+ speakers have public profiles on its platform, but its directory has no export. This Actor turns a category, search, or curated list into a spreadsheet of speakers with their topics, talk titles, and speaking history. You can shortlist speakers for a CFP, map who speaks about a technology, or find community leaders in a region without clicking through profiles one by one.

Limits and good-citizen notes

• 1,000 speakers per listing. Sessionize listings stop at 1,000 results (34 pages of 30; later pages return 404), and large categories and broad searches hit that cap. To go beyond that, split the work into narrower searches (topic, location, language) or several categories. Speakers that appear in more than one of your start URLs are only scraped and charged once per run.
• One page request per speaker. Each result needs its profile page, plus one listing request per 30 speakers. Runs are deliberately throttled (3 concurrent requests, at most 120 per minute). Sessionize profile pages are large and took about 3 to 4 seconds each in local test runs, which worked out to 30 to 47 requests per minute, or roughly 25 to 35 minutes per 1,000 speakers.
• robots.txt. Sessionize's robots.txt (checked 2026-09-15) disallows only /app/ and /submission/helper/. The Actor loads and honors robots.txt on every run.
• Public data only. The Actor never logs in and reads only what an anonymous visitor sees. It does not collect email addresses or phone numbers: profile pages don't show them, the profile's Contact dialog only repeats the speaker's own links (inviting a speaker requires a Sessionize login), mailto:/tel: links are dropped, and email addresses or phone numbers typed into a bio or tagline are replaced with [email removed] / [phone removed].
• Personal data. Speaker profiles are personal data under GDPR and similar laws. Sessionize speakers choose to make their profiles public, but you are responsible for having a lawful basis for how you store and use the data, for example when contacting speakers.
• Sessionize notes that it "is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers". Profiles are self-reported.

Built with Crawlee and the Apify SDK for JavaScript.

Reference docs used to build this Actor

• Apify SDK for JS: https://docs.apify.com/sdk/js/
• Pay-per-event monetization overview: https://docs.apify.com/platform/actors/publishing/monetize/pay-per-event
• Pay-per-event SDK guide (Actor.charge, ChargingManager, local test mode): https://docs.apify.com/sdk/js/docs/concepts/pay-per-event
• .actor/actor.json reference: https://docs.apify.com/platform/actors/development/actor-definition/actor-json