I measured what ranks an Apify Actor. It is not your title.
I published eight Actors on Apify Store in five days. Careful titles, real READMEs written from real runs, dataset schemas, published task examples, honest pay-per-event pricing. Then I searched the Store for the exact thing I had built and could not find myself. Not "found low". Not found at all in the first fifty results. So I stopped guessing and measured it. The answer is one number, it is…
An Apify Actor developer discovered that ranking in the Apify Store is not determined by the title of the Actor. The developer had published several Actors and optimized their titles, READMEs, and other details, but still could not find their own Actors in the search results. The ranking is based on the number of distinct users that have run the Actor, with the top-ranked Actors having the highest number of users over a period of 30 days.
Despite putting in effort to optimize the titles and other details, the developer's Actor was ranked much lower than Actors with similar names but higher user counts. The developer found that the ranking metric never decays, so every new user adds permanent rank equity, while those above cannot improve their ranking. To get initial users, the developer concluded that the Store is not the primary discovery channel, and users should come from other sources before the Apify Store can work for them.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
