Academy Sports + Outdoors Scraper

Academy Sports + Outdoors Scraper turns public Academy search, category and product pages into structured product records: name, SKU, brand, URL, price and price range, availability, images, rating and review count. Each record is one unique Academy product, billed once.

How does it handle Academy's bot check?

Academy shows a human-verification page to many requests from cloud servers. The Actor never solves or interacts with that page. When a request is challenged, it drops that connection and loads the page again over a different US access route (residential, then mobile IP addresses), within a fixed number of attempts per page. If every attempt is challenged, the run ends FAILED with a "Blocked" status message, writes a blocked SUMMARY, saves no records and charges no product events. The SUMMARY record shows which route served the data (accessPath) and the attempts per route.

What it extracts

Each record can include the product name, public SKU, brand, product URL, price and currency, price range, availability, images, aggregate rating, review count, source URL and collection time. Values that Academy does not publish are returned as null. The search endpoint does not include product descriptions, so description is null for search results.

Input

Use searchQueries for terms such as running shoes or camp chairs, or supply public Academy URLs in startUrls such as https://www.academy.com/search?searchTerm=running%20shoes. Queries and URLs run together; when both are empty the Actor searches running shoes. maxResults defaults to 25 (the input form starts at 3) and is capped at 200. A search page holds up to 50 products, so set maxPagesPerInput (default 1, maximum 10) high enough for the number you want, for example 4 pages for 200 products.

{
  "searchQueries": ["running shoes"],
  "maxResults": 25,
  "maxPagesPerInput": 1
}

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing. Current Apify Store event prices:

Event	FREE	BRONZE	SILVER	GOLD	When it is charged
product-extracted (primary)	$0.005001	$0.004875	$0.00475	$0.004	One unique Academy product record saved to the default dataset.
apify-actor-start	$0.006251	$0.006094	$0.005938	$0.005	Once per run per started GB of memory (the default is 256 MB, so one event).

A default run of 25 products costs about $0.13 on the FREE tier. A blocked run charges only the start event. Apify platform usage for the run is included in these prices.

FAQ

Does it log in or use my Academy account? No. It reads only public search, category and product pages.

Why did my run end FAILED with "Blocked"? Academy showed a human-verification page on every access route the run tried. No records were saved and no product events were charged. See the SUMMARY record for details.

Can I use my own proxy? No. The old proxyConfiguration input is ignored.

Are duplicates billed? No. Products are de-duplicated by product ID (or URL) before saving, and each saved product is charged once.

Where are run diagnostics? In the SUMMARY key-value record: status, counts, charged events, stop reason and warnings.

Compliance

Use only public pages and confirm that collection and downstream use comply with Academy's terms, applicable law and your authorization. Do not submit credentials, cookies or private account data.

Last verified: 2026-10-30