Bark Scraper

Extract aggregate ratings, review counts, and service taxonomy from Bark.com — the global services marketplace covering 11 countries (US, UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, India, Germany, France).

This actor scrapes Bark's public service-category pages (e.g. plumbers, electricians, accountants) at country, state, and city granularity. It pulls structured JSON-LD markup (AggregateRating, BreadcrumbList, LocalBusiness) directly from the page so every record is consistent and clean.

Note on robots.txt: This actor does not crawl per-professional /company/<slug>/ pages — those are robots-disallowed by Bark and out of scope here. We focus on the public service-aggregate surface area.

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What you get

For each scraped service-category page, the dataset contains a flat record with:

Field	Description
recordType	service (full record) or serviceUrl (URL-only, from discover mode)
url	Canonical Bark URL of the service page
country	Two-letter country code (us, gb, au, ca, ie, nz, sg, za, in, de, fr)
lang	Language slug (en, de, fr)
serviceSlug	URL-form service slug (e.g. plumbers, personal-trainers)
serviceName	Human-readable service title (e.g. General Plumbing)
state	State / region slug (when scraping a state- or city-level page)
city	City slug (when scraping a city-level page)
ratingValue	Aggregate rating (0–5 scale)
reviewCount	Total reviews counted toward the aggregate
currency	Currency accepted on this market
paymentAccepted	Comma-separated payment methods
openingHours	Service availability days
image, logo	Image URLs from the page
breadcrumb	Parent-category chain as ordered [{name, url}]
parentCategory	Convenience flat field — the immediate parent category
provider	Bark organization metadata (name, url, telephone, email)
lastModified	(discover mode only) lastmod timestamp from sitemap
scrapedAt	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp of the scrape

Empty / unknown fields are omitted rather than emitted as null or "".

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Modes

1. byUrls — scrape a list of Bark service URLs

Provide any mix of service, state, or city Bark URLs.

2. byService — build a URL from country + service [+ state + city]

Useful when you have a service slug (e.g. plumbers) and want a specific market.

3. discover — enumerate Bark service URLs from the sitemap

Walks Bark's public sitemap, filters by country + scope + service-name substring, and emits either lightweight serviceUrl records (fast) or full service records (when enrichDiscovered = true).

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Inputs

Input	Type	Required	Description
mode	enum	yes	byUrls, byService, discover
urls	array	mode=byUrls	Bark service URLs to scrape
country	enum	mode=byService / discover	Two-letter country code (11 options)
service	string	mode=byService	Service slug (e.g. plumbers)
state	string	mode=byService (optional)	State / region slug
city	string	mode=byService (optional)	City slug — requires state
discoverScope	enum	mode=discover	service-only, state-only, city-only, all, country-only
serviceFilter	string	mode=discover (optional)	Substring filter against the service slug
enrichDiscovered	bool	mode=discover (optional)	If true, fetch each discovered URL and emit a full record
minRatingValue	int (0–5)	optional	Drop records below this rating
minReviewCount	int	optional	Drop records below this review count
keywordIncludes	string	optional	Drop records whose service name doesn't include this keyword
maxItems	int (1–5000)	optional	Hard cap on emitted records
useProxy	bool	optional	Route through Apify proxy
autoEscalateOnBlock	bool	optional	Auto-engage Apify proxy on HTTP 403/429 (default true)

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Example inputs

Scrape a single US service page:

{
  "mode": "byUrls",
  "urls": ["https://www.bark.com/en/us/plumbers/"],
  "maxItems": 1
}

Scrape a UK service in London:

{
  "mode": "byService",
  "country": "gb",
  "service": "plumbers",
  "state": "london"
}

Discover plumbing-related service URLs in the US:

{
  "mode": "discover",
  "country": "us",
  "discoverScope": "service-only",
  "serviceFilter": "plumb",
  "maxItems": 50
}

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Example output

{
  "recordType": "service",
  "url": "https://www.bark.com/en/us/plumbers/",
  "lang": "en",
  "country": "us",
  "serviceSlug": "plumbers",
  "serviceName": "General Plumbing",
  "ratingValue": 4.7709,
  "reviewCount": 81413,
  "currency": "usd",
  "paymentAccepted": "Credit Card, Debit Card",
  "openingHours": "Mo-Su",
  "breadcrumb": [
    {"name": "Services", "url": "https://www.bark.com/en/us/services/"},
    {"name": "Heating, Hot Water & Air Conditioning", "url": "https://www.bark.com/en/us/heating-hot-water-air-conditioning/"},
    {"name": "General Plumbing"}
  ],
  "parentCategory": "Heating, Hot Water & Air Conditioning",
  "provider": {
    "name": "Bark",
    "url": "https://www.bark.com/",
    "telephone": "(424) 227-5323",
    "email": "team@bark.com"
  },
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-07T03:14:22.123456+00:00"
}

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Use cases

• Marketplace research — compare service-category ratings across countries.
• Pricing benchmarks — pair service + state to track regional differences.
• Competitive analysis — track how a service category's review count grows over time.
• SEO research — enumerate a competitor marketplace's full service taxonomy via the sitemap.
• Lead-generation territory mapping — discover which city/state pages exist for a service in any of the 11 supported countries.

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FAQ

Q: Do I need a Bark login or API key? No. Bark publishes the data we extract as public structured markup (JSON-LD) embedded in the page HTML.

Q: Can I scrape individual pro / professional profiles (/company/<slug>/)? No. Bark's robots.txt disallows that path and we honor it.

Q: Do I need a proxy? Usually no — Bark works fine from datacenter IPs. If you hit a block, set useProxy: true (or leave autoEscalateOnBlock: true, the default — the actor will engage Apify proxy automatically on HTTP 403/429).

Q: How does discover mode pick which sitemap shards to read? Bark publishes one shard per country (plus 11 default shards for the US). The actor reads the index, prioritizes shards matching your country filter, and walks each gzipped shard until maxItems is hit.

Q: What does enrichDiscovered do? By default discover emits lightweight serviceUrl records (URL + slugs only — fast, no per-URL HTTP). Setting enrichDiscovered: true makes the actor follow each URL and emit a full service record with rating, review count, breadcrumb, etc.

Q: Why are some output fields missing from a record? The actor never emits null or "". If a field is missing, Bark's page didn't include that data (e.g. some markets don't publish paymentAccepted).

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Limitations

• Per-professional /company/<slug>/ pages are excluded by design (robots-disallowed).
• The "country-only" discover scope returns 0 records because Bark's sitemap doesn't list country-root pages.
• Aggregate ratings reflect Bark's marketplace-wide signal for that service in that market — not a single business's rating.
• discover mode reads up to 11 sitemap shards; very deep walks (>5000 URLs) should be batched across runs via maxItems + serviceFilter.

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