Public Competitive Alternatives Directory Quality Agent

Evaluate public alternatives, competitors, tools, marketplace, or software directory pages for quality evidence: listing coverage, ranking, ratings, review counts, filter/sort controls, sponsored disclosure, pagination, CTA links, risk diagnostics, and stable hashes.

This Actor is built for AI agents, competitive-intelligence workflows, product marketers, and analyst assistants that need to decide whether one public directory page is usable evidence without crawling the directory, scraping review sites, or making recommendations.

What It Returns

• Directory page type and context terms.
• Sampled listing cards with names, ranks, ratings, review counts, sanitized profile links, and evidence text.
• Ranking, rating, review-count, filter/sort, sponsorship disclosure, pagination, and listing CTA signals.
• Focus-term matches, evidence snippets, evidence URLs, quality/confidence/ completeness scores, diagnostics, and a stable directoryQualityHash.

Pricing Behavior

The Actor uses pay-per-event pricing and only charges the useful result event when it finds useful, new or changed public directory-quality evidence.

Paid event:

• useful-alternatives-directory-quality-result

It does not charge the useful event for:

• invalid or private-network URLs;
• failed fetches;
• generic home, pricing, blog, case-study, procurement, hiring, privacy, or landing pages;
• explicit side-by-side product comparison pages;
• SaaS plan or feature entitlement matrices;
• pages with only one or two alternatives and no real directory structure;
• focusTerms misses;
• unchanged records when you pass a previous directoryQualityHash;
• duplicate normalized URLs in the same run.

apify-default-dataset-item is intentionally not used.

Scope And Safety

• Public HTTP/HTTPS HTML or text pages only.
• Private-network hosts, credentials, query strings, fragments, path parameters, and token-like account paths are rejected.
• JavaScript is not executed.
• Forms are not submitted.
• Listed product/profile/detail pages, review pages, PDFs, and external assets are recorded only as sanitized links and are not fetched.
• The Actor does not verify reviews, rank vendors, recommend purchases, scrape private pages, or enrich companies.

Example Input

{
  "directoryPageUrls": [
    "https://www.techjockey.com/category/project-management-software"
  ],
  "focusTerms": [
    "reviews"
  ],
  "requestTimeoutSecs": 20
}

Best Use Cases

• Check whether an alternatives or software directory page is evidence-rich or too thin.
• Monitor directory-quality changes without paying for unchanged results.
• Extract structured quality signals for market maps, battlecards, and AI research pipelines.
• Filter directory pages by focus product, category, review, rating, sponsored, or other evidence terms.