ConsumerAffairs Reviews Scraper

Extract ConsumerAffairs.com company profiles and individual customer reviews for review monitoring, complaint analysis, competitive intelligence, and market research in service-heavy industries (home services, insurance, finance, and health). For every review you get the star rating, title, full text, author location, published date, complaint category, company reply, and verified status — plus the company-level aggregate rating and total review count.

ConsumerAffairs is protected by PerimeterX (HUMAN) bot protection, so this Actor uses a headless browser (Playwright) through Apify's residential proxy to reliably bypass the challenge, with a plain-HTTP fast mode that falls back to the browser only when a company gets blocked.

Main Use Cases

• Review monitoring — track a company's ConsumerAffairs reviews and rating changes over time with scheduled runs.
• Complaint analysis — extract complaint categories and company replies to spot recurring issues and response quality.
• Competitive intelligence — compare review volumes, ratings, and common complaints across competitors in service industries.
• Reputation management — build cleaned customer reviews and verified-status data for PR and brand-sentiment teams.
• Market research — collect home warranty, insurance, financial-services, and health-industry reviews into a structured dataset.
• Consumer protection research — analyze consumer complaints and dispute patterns for policy and advocacy work.

Build Customer Reviews Datasets Without A Public API

ConsumerAffairs has no public API for its review data. This Actor pulls everything a reputation-monitoring or market-research pipeline needs directly from the public review pages — no login, no official API key required — and returns it as clean JSON, CSV, or Excel you can pipe into spreadsheets, dashboards, or downstream analytics.

How It Works

1. You supply one or more ConsumerAffairs company URLs or paths (e.g. homeowners/american_home_shield or a full consumeraffairs.com/insurance/geico.html URL).
2. In fast mode the Actor fetches company pages with plain HTTP (roughly 10x cheaper/faster), automatically falling back to a headless Playwright browser for any company that triggers a PerimeterX challenge.
3. It extracts the company profile (aggregate rating, total review count, category) and every individual review (rating, text, complaint category, company reply, verified status) up to your configured caps.
4. Results are written to the dataset as two record types — company and review — ready to download or fetch via the Apify API.

Input Parameters

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
companyUrls	string[]	Yes	—	ConsumerAffairs company page URLs or paths (e.g. insurance/am_home or https://www.consumeraffairs.com/insurance/geico.html)
maxReviewsPerCompany	integer	No	100	Max reviews to extract per company. 0 = unlimited
maxPagesPerCompany	integer	No	50	Safety cap on paginated pages crawled per company (min 1, max 500)
maxRequestsPerCrawl	integer	No	1000	Global safety cap on page requests for the whole run
scraperMode	string	No	fast	fast: plain-HTTP (cheaper/faster) with automatic browser fallback on blocks. browser: force headless Chrome for everything
debugSaveHtml	boolean	No	false	Save raw page HTML to the key-value store for selector debugging. Leave off for normal runs
proxy	object	No	Apify Proxy (RESIDENTIAL)	Apify proxy config; residential IPs recommended to avoid PerimeterX blocking

Example Input

{
    "companyUrls": [
        "homeowners/american_home_shield",
        "https://www.consumeraffairs.com/insurance/geico.html"
    ],
    "maxReviewsPerCompany": 100,
    "scraperMode": "fast"
}

Output

Each run produces a dataset with two record types.

Company profile ("type": "company"):

{
    "type": "company",
    "companyName": "American Home Shield",
    "companySlug": "homeowners/american_home_shield",
    "companyUrl": "https://www.consumeraffairs.com/homeowners/american_home_shield.html",
    "category": "homeowners",
    "overallRating": 3.8,
    "totalReviews": 12450,
    "verified": true
}

Review ("type": "review"):

{
    "type": "review",
    "companyName": "American Home Shield",
    "companySlug": "homeowners/american_home_shield",
    "companyUrl": "https://www.consumeraffairs.com/homeowners/american_home_shield.html",
    "rating": 5,
    "reviewTitle": "Great service",
    "reviewText": "Very satisfied with the coverage...",
    "authorName": "John D.",
    "authorLocation": "Houston, TX",
    "publishedDate": "2026-03-10",
    "complaintCategory": "Customer Service",
    "companyReply": "Thank you for your feedback...",
    "companyReplyDate": "March 12, 2026",
    "verified": true,
    "reviewUrl": "https://www.consumeraffairs.com/homeowners/american_home_shield.html#review-123"
}

Data Fields

Field	Description
rating	Star rating (1–5)
reviewTitle	Review headline
reviewText	Full review text
authorName	Reviewer name
authorLocation	Reviewer location (city, state)
publishedDate	Date the review was published
complaintCategory	Complaint/topic category (e.g. "Customer Service")
companyReply	Company response text (if any)
companyReplyDate	Date of the company reply
verified	Whether the review carries a verified badge
overallRating	Company aggregate rating (company profile)
totalReviews	Company total review count (company profile)

Scheduling, Integrations & Automation

This Actor runs serverless and works with every Apify integration:

• API access — call it programmatically from any language via the Apify API.
• Webhooks, Zapier, Make — pipe new reviews and rating changes into Google Sheets, Slack, or your own alerting pipeline.
• Scheduling — set a daily or weekly recurring run per company. Review monitoring is a continuous job: consumers leave new reviews constantly, ratings shift, and new complaints appear, so a recurring schedule catches the changes a one-off pull misses (recurring usage also improves Apify's Store recommendation signals).

Related Actors

For a fuller picture of a company's reputation across review platforms, combine this Actor with other review-data Actors in the same topic cluster:

• Trustpilot Reviews Scraper — AI Reputation Monitor (harvestlab) — cross-platform company review data for reputation monitoring.
• Google Maps Reviews Scraper (compass) — local business reviews and ratings for service businesses.

FAQ

Why use this Actor instead of a ConsumerAffairs API?

ConsumerAffairs does not offer a public API for its review data. This Actor provides the only practical way to get structured company profiles and individual reviews — including complaint categories, company replies, and verified status — at scale, without manual copy-paste or brittle one-off scripts.

Does the Actor handle ConsumerAffairs bot protection?

Yes. Fast mode uses plain HTTP and automatically falls back to a headless Playwright browser (with stealth init scripts) for any company that triggers a PerimeterX (HUMAN) challenge. Using Apify's residential proxy is strongly recommended for reliability; consumer IPs may occasionally still be challenged.

What are alternatives to this Actor for review data?

For cross-platform company reputation data, alternatives include Trustpilot and Google Maps review scrapers (see Related Actors). For scraping ConsumerAffairs specifically, the key differentiators of this Actor are the full field set (complaint category, company replies, verified status) in a single dataset, the cheap fast mode, and pay-per-result pricing.

How do I monitor a company's reviews and rating changes?

Set maxReviewsPerCompany to your desired cap and schedule a recurring run (daily or weekly) for that company's URL. Compare rating, complaintCategory, and totalReviews across runs to detect trends and new complaints.

How do I extract complaint categories and company replies?

These come out of the box as the complaintCategory, companyReply, and companyReplyDate fields on every review record — no extra configuration needed.

Is scraping ConsumerAffairs legal?

Reviews and ratings on ConsumerAffairs are publicly accessible without a login; this Actor only collects publicly visible information. Always review the target site's terms of service and applicable data-protection regulations for your use case.

For AI Agents & LLM Apps

Purpose: Given one or more ConsumerAffairs company URLs, returns a company profile plus every available customer review (rating, text, complaint category, company reply, verified status) as dataset records of type company and review.

Minimal working input:

{ "companyUrls": ["homeowners/american_home_shield"] }

Variant — two extraction modes (scraperMode):

• fast (default): plain HTTP, ~10x cheaper/faster, automatic headless-browser fallback only when a company is blocked.
• browser: force headless Chrome for every company (more reliable against PerimeterX, more expensive).

Output fields (dataset): type, companyName, companySlug, companyUrl, category, overallRating, totalReviews, rating, reviewTitle, reviewText, authorName, authorLocation, publishedDate, complaintCategory, companyReply, companyReplyDate, verified, reviewUrl.

Behaviors an agent should know:

• companyUrls is the only required field; the act is a no-op without it.
• maxReviewsPerCompany: 0 means unlimited — set an explicit integer cap to control cost/run time (default 100).
• scraperMode is lower-cost by default; choose browser only when fast mode returns empty/blocked results.
• proxy should use Apify's residential group for reliability; datacenter IPs increase PerimeterX blocking.
• debugSaveHtml: true adds billed storage (saves every page's HTML) — leave off for normal runs.
• Two record types are emitted (company and review); group by companySlug-style companyUrl to join them.

Billing model: pay-per-event — $0.005 per result (dataset item) plus a small flat start event. Compute is browser-grade in browser mode (roughly 1.5–3 CU per 100 review pages) plus residential proxy traffic. Free accounts are capped at 10 reviews per company; paid runs respect the configured maxReviewsPerCompany.

Legal & Compliance Disclaimer

This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by ConsumerAffairs, Inc. It accesses only publicly visible review and company pages on consumeraffairs.com — no login, no CAPTCHA solving, no bypass of paid or private content. Because the output includes reviewer names and locations, users are responsible for their own compliance with ConsumerAffairs' Terms of Service and applicable data-protection law, including GDPR/CCPA where the data concerns EU or California individuals. Reviewer names and locations should not be used for unsolicited commercial outreach in violation of applicable law (e.g. CAN-SPAM, GDPR, TCPA). This is not legal advice.

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