Chrome Web Store Review & Ranking Monitor

Tracks your own Chrome extensions' ratings, review sentiment, install-count range, and best-effort category ranking against named competitor extensions. £0.002 per extension checked.

What it does

Give it a list of Chrome Web Store extension IDs — your own extension plus any competitors you want to benchmark against — and it returns, per extension:

• Current rating and rating count
• Install count, as the official Chrome Web Store display range (see Important limitation below)
• Recent reviews (rating, text, date)
• An LLM-generated sentiment summary of those recent reviews (optional)
• Best-effort category rank (see Important limitation below)

Inputs

Field	Default	Description
extensionIds	["ddkjiahejlhfcafbddmgiahcphecmpfh", "gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom"] (uBlock Origin Lite, AdBlock)	Chrome Web Store extension IDs — the 32-character ID from the extension's store URL
trackReviews	true	Fetch recent reviews and run a sentiment-summary pass

Find an extension's ID in its store URL: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/{name}/{extensionId} — the ID is the last path segment.

Output fields

Each dataset record includes: extensionId, extensionName, found, storeUrl, installCount, rating, ratingCount, categoryRank, category, description, version, firstSeenOrPublishedAt (approximate, see note below), sizeOnDisk, recentReviews[] (rating, text, date), reviewsAvailable, sentimentSummary, warnings[], scrapedAt.

Important limitations (please read)

installCount is always a range, never an exact number. The Chrome Web Store itself never publicly displays a precise install count anywhere — only rounded tiers such as "10,000,000+ users", "100,000+ users", "1,000+ users", etc. This actor mirrors that same official bucketing convention rather than fabricating false precision. Treat installCount as a rough popularity tier, not a KPI to trend at a granular level.

categoryRank is always "best-effort: not available". Chrome Web Store does not expose an extension's position within its category anywhere on the extension's own page. The only way to approximate it is to scrape category browse-listing pages and search for the extension's position — which live testing during development confirmed is fragile, not guaranteed to reflect the real in-store ordering, and not something Google documents or stabilizes. Rather than force a scrape that would silently break or mislead, this field is always reported as explicitly unavailable so you never mistake a guess for a real ranking.

Review text and rating/install stats require a live extension. If an extension has been delisted, removed, or unpublished (for example, classic uBlock Origin — an MV2 extension Google removed from the store in 2026), the actor reports found: false with a clear warning rather than fabricating data.

Technical notes

Chrome Web Store migrated fully to chromewebstore.google.com/detail/{slug}/{id} (the legacy chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/... URL still works but is only a redirect). The URL slug is cosmetic — only the 32-character extension ID matters for resolving a listing.

For a currently-published extension, its name, rating, rating count, description, category, and install metric are present as real server-rendered JSON embedded directly in the page HTML (Google's AF_initDataCallback pattern, the same embedded-JSON-state approach used on other modern Google properties) — no headless browser is required to retrieve them. Recent review text, author, rating, and date are likewise real, server-rendered data on the extension's dedicated /reviews sub-page.

The one piece of data that is not available this way is an authenticated live RPC (batchexecute) that the store's front-end calls client-side for certain interactive UI states — during development this was found to require a real logged-in browser session and, when tested against a real headless browser, actually triggered Google's bot/consent interstitial more often than a plain HTTP request. We deliberately did not build on that fragile path since none of this actor's required output fields depend on it.

Sentiment summary

When trackReviews is enabled, the actor makes a single Anthropic API call per extension (not per review) over its most recent reviews to produce a short sentiment summary — what users like, common complaints, and whether the trend looks positive, mixed, or negative. Requires ANTHROPIC_API_KEY to be set in the actor's environment; if it is not set, or no review text was retrieved, sentiment is skipped gracefully with a warning in the extension's warnings[] field rather than failing the run.

Pricing (Pay Per Event)

Event	Price	Charged when
Actor Start	$0.05	Once per run (built-in)
Extension Stats Checked	$0.002	Per extension successfully checked (install range, rating, rating count captured)
Category Rank Captured	$0.004	Additionally, only if a best-effort category position is ever successfully determined (currently never fires — see limitation above)
Review Sentiment Summary Generated	$0.006	trackReviews is on and the LLM sentiment pass actually ran