Give your AI agent web-data tools with Apify's MCP server (Python, no SDK, 2026)

Most AI agents can now talk to remote MCP servers. Apify runs one at https://mcp.apify.com, and any public Actor in Apify Store can be exposed through it as a tool your agent can call: SSL checks, DNS audits, broken-link crawls, screenshots, keyword research and thousands more.

This post shows what actually happens on the wire, with a ~50-line stdlib Python client, so you can see exactly what your agent sees and pays for.

?tools= takes a comma-separated list of Actors:

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=datawright-labs/ssl-certificate-checker,datawright-labs/email-domain-dns-checker Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Auth is your Apify API token as Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_TOKEN> (free account; Actors bill per result on your own account).

""" Call Apify Store Actors as MCP tools from plain Python (stdlib only). Usage: APIFY_TOKEN=... python3 mcp_agent_tools.py """ import json, os, urllib. request TOOLS = " datawright-labs/ssl-certificate-checker,datawright-labs/email-domain-dns-checker " URL = f " https://mcp.apify.com?tools= { TOOLS } " HEADERS = { " Authorization ": " Bearer " + os. environ [ " APIFY_TOKEN " ], " Content-Type ": " application/json ", " Accept ": " application/json, text/event-stream ", } def rpc ( body, session = None ): h = dict ( HEADERS ) if session: h [ " mcp-session-id " ] = session req = urllib. request. Request ( URL, data = json. dumps ( body ). encode (), headers = h ) with urllib. request. urlopen ( req, timeout = 180 ) as r: text = r. read (). decode () sid = r. headers. get ( " mcp-session-id " ) or session # Streamable HTTP may answer as SSE ("data: {...}") or plain JSON msgs = [ json. loads ( l [ 5:]) for l in text. splitlines () if l. startswith ( " data: " )] return ( msgs [ - 1 ] if msgs else ( json. loads ( text ) if text. strip () else None )), sid # 1.

Handshake _, sid = rpc ({ " jsonrpc ": " 2.0 ", " id ": 1, " method ": " initialize ", " params ": { " protocolVersion ": " 2025-03-26 ", " capabilities ": {}, " clientInfo ": { " name ": " tutorial ", " version ": " 1 " }}}) rpc ({ " jsonrpc ": " 2.0 ", " method ": " notifications/initialized " }, sid ) # 2. What tools does the agent see? tools, _ = rpc ({ " jsonrpc ": " 2.0 ", " id ": 2, " method ": " tools/list " }, sid ) for t in tools [ " result " ][ " tools " ]: print ( f " - { t [ ' name ' ] }: { t. get ( ' description ', '' )[: 90 ] } " ) # 3. Call one, exactly like an agent would name = next ( t [ " name " ] for t in tools [ " result " ][ " tools " ] if " ssl-certificate-checker " in t [ " name " ]) res, _ = rpc ({ " jsonrpc ": " 2.0 ", " id ": 3, " method ": " tools/call ", " params ": { " name ": name, " arguments ": { " domains ": [ " example.com ", " github.com ", " expired.badssl.com " ]}}}, sid ) for c in res [ " result " ][ " content " ]: print ( c. get ( " text ", "" )[: 1500 ]) # 4.

The call returns a run summary; the rows come from get-dataset-items (the agent's next step) run = json. loads ( res [ " result " ][ " content " ][ 0 ][ " text " ]) ds = run [ " storages " ][ " datasets " ][ " default " ][ " id " ] items, _ = rpc ({ " jsonrpc ": " 2.0 ", " id ": 4, " method ": " tools/call ", " params ": { " name ": " get-dataset-items ", " arguments ": { " datasetId ": ds, " limit ": 20, " fields ": " host,status,daysUntilExpiry,issuerOrganization,problems " }}}, sid ) for c in items [ " result " ][ " content " ]: print ( c. get ( " text ", "" )[: 2000 ]) Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode 3. What the agent sees tools/list returns one tool per Actor ( datawright-labs--ssl-certificate-checker, datawright-labs--email-domain-dns-checker ) plus four helpers: get-actor-run, get-dataset-items, get-key-value-store-record, abort-actor-run.

Calling the Actor tool runs it and returns a run summary, not the rows: status, run time, item count, the field list and a nextStep hint telling the agent to call get-dataset-items. Good agents follow that hint; if yours stops at "SUCCEEDED", tell it to fetch the dataset items. Passing fields= keeps the tokens down:

{ "host": "example.com", "status": "ok", "daysUntilExpiry": 63, "problems":[]} { "host": "github.com", "status": "ok", "daysUntilExpiry": 37, "problems":[]} { "host": "expired.badssl.com", "status": "expired", "daysUntilExpiry": -4212, "problems":[ "Certificate expired", "Not trusted: CERT_HAS_EXPIRED" ]} Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode That whole round trip took about 9 seconds and cost $0.003 (3 hosts at $1 per 1,000).

Any client that supports remote Streamable HTTP MCP servers with a header takes the same two values (URL + Bearer header). Two configs we tested end to end for connection and tool discovery:

Disclosure: the two example Actors are ours (Datawright Labs). Any Store Actor works the same way.