Seeking Alpha Analysis Feed Scraper

Collect recent public Seeking Alpha analysis and news metadata for stock tickers. Each dataset row combines a headline with its author, publication time, comment count, canonical URL, related symbols, company classification, and current quote context from the public symbol overview.

Use the Actor for watchlist monitoring, investment-research ingestion, sentiment pipelines, and recurring market-news refreshes. It does not extract article bodies, premium quant ratings, portfolios, account data, or subscriber-only content.

What does Seeking Alpha Analysis Feed Scraper do?

The Actor accepts ticker symbols or public Seeking Alpha symbol URLs. For every symbol, it reads the public overview and returns the newest visible records from two feed types:

• Analysis — Seeking Alpha contributor analysis metadata.
• News — Seeking Alpha news alert metadata.

Results from both feeds are merged by publication time and deduplicated by their stable source type and ID. A global maxItems limit keeps scheduled runs bounded. When multiple tickers are supplied, the result budget is distributed across the watchlist so one active symbol does not consume the whole run.

The implementation is HTTP-first. It does not launch a browser or automatically use residential proxies, which keeps runs lightweight and predictable.

Who is it for?

Investment research teams

Refresh a coverage list before a morning research meeting and send the dataset to a spreadsheet, warehouse, or internal dashboard.

Portfolio and watchlist operators

Schedule repeated runs for symbols held in a portfolio and compare new IDs with a previous run to detect newly published commentary.

Sentiment and event pipelines

Use headlines, content type, author, comment count, and related tickers as inputs to classification, alerting, or human-review workflows.

Financial data product teams

Enrich an existing quote or fundamentals product with source-specific public analysis and news discovery links without collecting premium article text.

Why use this Actor?

• Provide tickers directly or paste Seeking Alpha symbol URLs.
• Return analysis, news, or both from one consistent contract.
• Include quote and company context on every feed record.
• Deduplicate stable source IDs and canonical URLs.
• Apply a hard global result limit of up to 500 records.
• Fail clearly when the source returns a challenge or an unexpected schema.
• Avoid account credentials, browser sessions, and automatic paid proxy traffic.
• Produce typed rows ready for CSV, JSON, Excel, API, webhooks, or datasets.

This v1 is intentionally narrower than products that promise article bodies, ratings, transcripts, or private portfolio features. Its job is a repeatable, public ticker analysis/news metadata feed.

What data can you extract?

Field	Meaning
sourceId	Stable Seeking Alpha article or news ID
contentType	analysis or news
ticker	Canonical requested symbol
companyName	Company name from the symbol overview
sector	Seeking Alpha sector
industry	Seeking Alpha industry
exchange	Trading exchange
currency	Quote currency
lastPrice	Latest price visible during collection
previousClose	Previous close from quote context
volume	Latest reported volume
quoteTimestamp	Source timestamp for quote context
marketState	Market status reported by Seeking Alpha
headline	Public analysis or news headline
author	Contributor or Seeking Alpha news editor
publishedAt	Publication time in ISO 8601 format
commentCount	Reported number of comments
articleUrl	Canonical analysis or news URL
relatedTickers	Symbols linked to the record
isPaywalled	Whether the linked item is marked paywalled/Pro
sourceUrl	Symbol overview used for context
scrapedAt	Collection timestamp

Quote or classification values can be null when Seeking Alpha does not expose them for a particular instrument. The Actor never follows a paywalled record to extract its body.

How much does it cost to scrape Seeking Alpha analysis feeds?

The Actor uses pay-per-event pricing:

• Start: $0.005 per run.
• Feed record: $0.000054785 per saved record on the FREE tier.
• Paid Apify plans receive the active tier discount shown before starting a run.

Example calculations with the current pricing are:

Saved records	Charge calculation
10	Start fee + 10 × the applicable item-tier price
100	Start fee + 100 × the applicable item-tier price
500	Start fee + 500 × the applicable item-tier price

The Actor charges only for validated rows it attempts to save. Duplicates, rejected shapes, failed requests, and empty responses are not item events. Apify shows the exact active price and maximum run charge before execution.

Getting started

1. Open the Actor in Apify Console.
2. Enter one or more values in Stock tickers, such as AAPL and MSFT.
3. Alternatively, add public URLs such as https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/NVDA.
4. Select Analysis, News, or both.
5. Set Maximum results. Start with 10–50 for a first run.
6. Click Start.
7. Open the Results dataset and export JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or RSS.
8. Save the task and add a schedule if you need recurring refreshes.

A useful first input is:

{
  "tickers": ["AAPL", "MSFT"],
  "includeTypes": ["analysis", "news"],
  "maxItems": 20
}

Input parameters

tickers

An optional array of 1–50 stock symbols. Symbols are normalized to uppercase. Letters, numbers, dots, colons, and hyphens are supported, including values such as BRK.B. Duplicate symbols are removed.

startUrls

An optional array of public seekingalpha.com/symbol/{TICKER} URLs. Symbol subpages such as /analysis and /news are accepted and normalized to the symbol overview. Other hosts and non-symbol paths are rejected.

You can combine tickers and startUrls in the same run.

includeTypes

Select one or both supported values:

• analysis
• news

The default in Console is both feed types.

maxItems

Global number of records to save across all symbols. Allowed range: 1–500. The default is 50. For a multi-symbol watchlist, the Actor allocates the remaining result budget across the remaining symbols.

Output example

A real run produces rows shaped like this (values abbreviated):

{
  "sourceId": "4925269",
  "contentType": "analysis",
  "ticker": "AAPL",
  "companyName": "Apple Inc.",
  "sector": "Information Technology",
  "industry": "Technology Hardware, Storage and Peripherals",
  "exchange": "NASDAQ",
  "currency": "USD",
  "lastPrice": 333.02,
  "previousClose": 321.66,
  "volume": 47489415.903844,
  "quoteTimestamp": "2026-07-24T21:28:44.930-04:00",
  "marketState": "Market Close",
  "headline": "Apple: Q3 Is About Cameras, Not AI - Here's Why That's A Good Thing",
  "author": "Rick Orford",
  "publishedAt": "2026-07-24T13:54:05.000Z",
  "commentCount": 8,
  "articleUrl": "https://seekingalpha.com/article/4925269-apple-q3-is-about-cameras-not-ai-heres-why-thats-a-good-thing",
  "relatedTickers": ["AAPL"],
  "isPaywalled": false,
  "sourceUrl": "https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/AAPL",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-07-26T03:00:00.000Z"
}

Prices and engagement change over time. Treat quote fields as context captured at scrapedAt, not as a guaranteed exchange-grade real-time market data service.

Monitoring and integration workflows

Scheduled watchlist refresh

Create a saved task with 10–50 symbols and schedule it hourly or daily. Compare contentType:id against your own previous snapshot to identify new records.

Slack or email alerts

Connect an Apify webhook to Make, Zapier, n8n, or your own endpoint. Filter new rows by ticker, headline keywords, author, or comment count before sending alerts.

Sentiment enrichment

Send headline, contentType, ticker, and publishedAt to a classifier. Keep articleUrl as the citation link for a human reviewer.

Data warehouse ingestion

Read the default dataset through the Apify API and upsert on contentType + sourceId. Store scrapedAt and quote fields as observation metadata.

Use with the Apify API

Replace APIFY_TOKEN with a secret environment variable, never a committed value.

cURL

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/automation-lab~seeking-alpha-analysis-feed-scraper/runs?waitForFinish=300" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"tickers":["AAPL","MSFT"],"includeTypes":["analysis","news"],"maxItems":20}'

JavaScript

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });
const run = await client.actor(
  'automation-lab/seeking-alpha-analysis-feed-scraper',
).call({
  tickers: ['AAPL', 'MSFT'],
  includeTypes: ['analysis', 'news'],
  maxItems: 20,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Python

import os
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient(os.environ["APIFY_TOKEN"])
run = client.actor(
    "automation-lab/seeking-alpha-analysis-feed-scraper"
).call(run_input={
    "tickers": ["AAPL", "MSFT"],
    "includeTypes": ["analysis", "news"],
    "maxItems": 20,
})

items = client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).list_items().items
print(items)

Use with MCP and AI agents

Add this Actor as an Apify MCP tool in Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http apify \
  "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=automation-lab/seeking-alpha-analysis-feed-scraper"

Claude Desktop, Cursor, and VS Code setup

Claude Desktop, Cursor, and VS Code can use this MCP configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=automation-lab/seeking-alpha-analysis-feed-scraper"
    }
  }
}

Example prompts for MCP

• “Using the Apify MCP tool, collect the newest Seeking Alpha analysis and news for AAPL and MSFT.”
• “Use MCP to return only analysis metadata for the NVDA symbol page.”
• “Through MCP, refresh these five tickers and summarize which headlines have the most comments.”

The Actor returns source records; an AI agent can summarize or classify them in a separate step.

Tips for reliable runs

• Start with a small maxItems while designing your downstream workflow.
• Use ticker inputs instead of constructing URLs when you already know symbols.
• Use analysis only if news alerts would add noise to your pipeline.
• Schedule at a cadence appropriate for the source; constant polling is wasteful.
• Deduplicate downstream using contentType and id.
• Inspect run logs after a source challenge or schema error.
• Retry later rather than immediately repeating a blocked run.
• Do not add login cookies or private credentials to Actor input.

Limits and failure behavior

• The Actor supports public symbol overview, analysis metadata, and news metadata.
• It does not extract analysis bodies, premium ratings, transcripts, portfolios, account pages, recommendations, or subscriber-only fields.
• maxItems is capped at 500 and the ticker list at 50 per run.
• Source timestamps and market states are reported by Seeking Alpha.
• A linked item can be marked paywalled even though its public metadata is visible.
• Seeking Alpha can change its HTML, JSON shape, or anti-bot controls.
• The Actor retries transient timeouts, HTTP 429, and temporary server failures.
• Deterministic 4xx responses and malformed inputs are not retried blindly.
• One invalid upstream ticker does not discard useful rows from other valid tickers.
• If no validated feed record can be saved, the run fails instead of returning a misleading quote-only success.

Responsible use and legality

Use this Actor only for data you are legally permitted to collect and process. Review Seeking Alpha’s Terms of Use, robots guidance, and any applicable market data licensing terms for your use case. Do not use the Actor to bypass access controls, reproduce premium content, impersonate users, or create a substitute for subscriber-only services.

Headlines, author names, and article links can be copyrighted or personal data in some jurisdictions. Keep a lawful purpose, minimize retention, honor deletion or access obligations, and preserve source attribution. This documentation is not legal advice.

Troubleshooting

Why did the run say that no useful records were saved?

Check that each ticker exists on Seeking Alpha and that the selected feed type has recent public records. The run also fails this way when the source returns a challenge or no longer exposes the expected SSR/feed shape.

Why was my URL rejected?

Only seekingalpha.com/symbol/{TICKER} URLs and their symbol subpages are in scope. Paste a symbol URL or supply the ticker directly.

Why is a quote field null?

Some instruments or market states do not expose every quote field. Feed metadata can still be valid; nullable quote fields are part of the output contract.

Why are fewer than maxItems returned?

maxItems is a ceiling, not a promise. The selected feed can be naturally sparse, records can overlap across requested symbols, or a symbol can fail while others succeed.

Does the Actor open or scrape premium articles?

No. It emits public discovery metadata and the canonical link only. The isPaywalled flag describes the linked item; it does not bypass the paywall.

Related automation-lab Actors

• Stocktwits Scraper for social investing messages and ticker conversation signals.
• Google News Scraper for broader publisher coverage and keyword-based news discovery.
• Yahoo Finance Scraper for a different public finance data and news source.

Use this Actor when the source-specific Seeking Alpha analysis/news feed is the important signal. Combine it with broader news or social sources when you need a multi-source market-monitoring workflow.

FAQ

Can I use both tickers and start URLs?

Yes. They are normalized into one deduplicated symbol list.

Are results returned in publication order?

Rows for each symbol are merged from the selected feeds and sorted newest first. Multi-symbol output is grouped by the order of requested symbols.

Can I request only news?

Yes. Set includeTypes to ["news"].

Can I request historical article bodies?

No. Article body extraction and premium content are deliberately outside v1.

Does the Actor need a proxy?

No automatic proxy route is enabled. The tested implementation uses direct, lightweight HTTP requests with conservative retry behavior.

How should I identify a record in my database?

Use the pair contentType and sourceId. Keep articleUrl as the canonical source link.

Is the quote real-time?

It is the latest context Seeking Alpha placed on the public overview when the Actor fetched it. Use licensed exchange-grade feeds for trading decisions that require guaranteed real-time data.

Can I schedule the Actor?

Yes. Save the input as an Apify task, attach a schedule, and consume the dataset through webhooks or the API.