LLMs don't know what's trending today, what the news said this morning, or why your app's rating dropped yesterday. Instead of writing a scraper per question, you can give an agent a few ready-made scrapers as tools through MCP (Model Context Protocol), and let it decide when to call them.

The setup

Apify runs a hosted MCP server at mcp.apify.com that exposes Actors (hosted scrapers) as tools. You choose which Actors it offers. For a "what's happening" assistant I add these ( I maintain them ):

fjordlabs/google-trending-now : today's trending searches per country

fjordlabs/google-news : headlines for a query, any country

fjordlabs/google-trends : interest over time for keywords

fjordlabs/google-play-reviews and fjordlabs/app-store-reviews : recent app reviews

In an MCP client config (Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code and others use this shape) it looks like this:

{ "mcpServers" : { "apify" : { "url" :…