Here’s a thing that will make you feel seen: you’re running an actual business, but you can’t easily get your hands on your own numbers. Your KDP sales live in a dashboard you have to visit manually. Your Amazon reviews and rankings are scattered across product pages you’d have to check by hand. Your royalty data exists in spreadsheets you download like some kind of digital peasant.
This is the reality for indie authors, and it’s annoying.
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The platforms that sell your books weren’t built with automation in mind—they gave us dashboards and manual exports instead of APIs and integrations, which means your data stays locked inside their systems until you personally go retrieve it. Some third-party services have emerged to help with this (BookReport, Book Tracker, and similar tools pull KDP data for you), and they’re genuinely useful if their specific features match what you need. But if you want to customize exactly what data you’re tracking and where it goes, building your own automation gives you that flexibility.
That’s where browser automation comes in. These platforms can visit websites, click around, and grab data the way a very caffeinated, very patient assistant would—except they never need coffee breaks and they don’t judge you for checking your sales rank at 2 AM.
These tools are genuinely useful. They’re also operating in a space that deserves a few minutes of thought before you dive in. Let’s talk about it, and then I’ll show you how to actually set one up.
The Quick Ethics Bit I’m not going to bury you in legal citations (you’re welcome), but here’s the landscape in plain English.
Scraping publicly available data—the stuff anyone can see without logging in—is generally considered fair game. Courts have consistently ruled that visiting a public webpage with a bot isn’t meaningfully different from visiting it with a browser. Your Amazon product page, your public reviews, your book’s ranking—all visible to anyone with an internet connection.
The murkier territory involves logging into accounts. Your KDP dashboard, your detailed analytics, your private reports—those sit behind authentication. Automating access to that data violates platform terms of service, and platforms can enforce those terms by doing things you really don’t want, like suspending your account.
For authors, the practical risk calculation looks like this: scraping your public Amazon product page is low-risk. Automating logins to your KDP dashboard is higher-risk, and if your income depends on uninterrupted Amazon access, that risk might not be worth taking.
The automation I’m going to show you stays on the safe side of that line. We’re grabbing publicly visible data from your Amazon book page—sales rank, review stats, category rankings. Data anyone can see by visiting the URL, no login required.
Meet Browse AI Browse AI is a no-code browser automation platform that lets you point at data on a webpage and tell a robot to go grab it.
The free plan gives you 50 credits per month, which is enough to test things and run small extractions. Paid plans start around $19/month if you need more volume.
Here’s what we’re building: a robot that visits your Amazon book page, extracts your category rankings and review stats, and can push that data wherever you need it—Google Sheets, Airtable, Make.com, you name it.
Building Your Book Data Robot Step 1: Grab Your Book URL
You need your Amazon product page URL. Get the cleanest link you can without all the keywords and marketing add-ons. I used an older title that’s about to have a book two, so I want to see what this does to this book’s ranking.
The ASIN (that alphanumeric code after /dp/) is unique to your book. Grab yours from your Amazon product page or your KDP dashboard.
Step 2: Create a New Robot
Head to browse.ai and sign up if you haven’t already. From your dashboard, click to create a new robot.
You’ll land on the “New Data Extraction Robot” screen. Paste your Amazon book URL in the Origin URL field. Leave the “This website needs logging in” checkbox unchecked—we’re scraping public data, no authentication needed.
Hit “Start Training Robot.”
Step 3: Tell the Robot What to Grab
Browse AI loads your actual book page and lets you point and click on the data you want. When you’re just getting started, choose “text extraction” and then choose what fields on the page you want.
I grabbed two things:
Sales Rank: Click on your Best Sellers Rank on the product page. Browse AI captures it as text. For my book, that pulled in “#5,622 in Witch Romances #6,966 in Witch & Wizard Mysteries #12,336 in Paranormal Witches & Wizards Romance”—all my category rankings in one grab.
Customer Reviews: Click on the review summary area. This captures the star rating, total ratings count, and the percentage breakdown by star level. Mine showed “Customer reviews 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.5 out of 5 2 global ratings 5 star 50% 4 star 50% 3 star 0% 2 star 0% 1 star 0%.”
You can grab whatever data matters to you—price, title, description, whatever’s visible on the page. Just click on it, give it a name, and the robot remembers.
Step 4: Review and Approve
Once you’ve selected your data points, Browse AI runs a test extraction. You’ll see exactly what the robot captured in a clean table format.
Check that everything looks right. The robot shows you the “Final Screen”—a screenshot of your book page with the steps it took listed on the side: Navigate to origin URL, Capture visible text (Rank), Capture visible text (bestsellers), Capture visible text (customer reviews).
If something’s off, you can retrain. If it looks good, click “Yes, looks good” and approve your robot.
Step 5: Connect Your Integrations
This is where it gets fun. Click on the Integrate tab and you’ll see your options: Google Sheets, Zapier, Webhooks, Rest API, Airtable, Pabbly Connect, Make.com, Workflows, Integrately, and AWS.
For most authors, Google Sheets is the easy button. Connect your Google account, pick a spreadsheet (or create one), and map your captured fields to columns. Now every time the robot runs, your data lands in a spreadsheet automatically.
If you’re already living in Airtable or running automations through Make.com, those integrations work the same way—connect, map, done.
Step 6: Set Up Monitoring
If you want to take a look regularly, click the Monitor tab and set a schedule. Daily, weekly, whatever makes sense for how often you want to track your rankings.
You can also set up alerts to get notified when your rank crosses a certain threshold or when new reviews appear. Very satisfying when you’re running a promo and want to watch the numbers move.
What You Can Actually Do With This A spreadsheet of rankings is nice. A spreadsheet that feeds into other automations is better.
Track your launch. Set monitoring to daily (or hourly during launch week) and watch your category rank climb. Export to a chart. Feel the dopamine.
Spot trends. Over time, you’ll see patterns—how your rank responds to promotions, how reviews affect sales rank, when your category gets competitive.
Monitor your backlist. Set up a robot for each book. One dashboard showing all your titles, updating automatically. No more clicking through five different product pages.
Compare to comps. Nothing stops you from running this same robot setup on competitor books in your genre. Create a Browse AI bot for each comp title you want to track, point them at the same data (rank, reviews, pricing), and feed everything into the same spreadsheet or Airtable base. Now you’ve got a competitive intelligence dashboard that updates itself. You can see when a competitor runs a sale, when their rank spikes (probably a promo worth investigating), and how your performance stacks up over time.
Monitor your categories. You can also build bots that scrape Amazon category pages directly—not just individual books, but the bestseller lists themselves. Track which books are climbing, which are falling, and what patterns emerge in your corner of the market. This is the kind of market research that used to require hours of manual clicking, and now it just shows up in a spreadsheet every morning.
Feed your marketing brain. This is where the real magic happens. Connect Browse AI to Make.com and you can trigger actions based on what the data shows. Hit top 1,000 in a category? Auto-post a celebration to social media. New review appears? Send yourself a Slack notification so you can respond quickly.
But here’s where it gets genuinely exciting: you can add an AI node to your Make.com scenario. Once your rank and review data flows into Make, route it through an Anthropic or OpenAI module and ask Claude or ChatGPT to analyze what’s happening. Your prompt might be something like: “Here’s my current category rank, my review stats, and my pricing. Here’s the same data for my top three competitors. What patterns do you see, and what three actions would you recommend to improve my visibility this week?”
Now you’re not just collecting data—you’re getting personalized business intelligence delivered automatically. The AI can spot things you might miss when you’re too close to your own numbers, and it can suggest experiments worth trying based on what’s working for similar books. You can schedule this to run weekly and land in your inbox every Monday morning with fresh strategic suggestions.
The combination of automated data collection plus AI analysis turns a simple rank tracker into something that actually thinks alongside you. And because you built it yourself, you can customize the prompts, add new data sources, and tweak the analysis to match exactly how you think about your business.
The Bigger Picture Browser automation tools like Browse AI represent a practical middle path. You can’t get official API access to your book data, but you can extract publicly visible information in ways that are straightforward and low-risk. And unlike off-the-shelf tracking services, you control exactly what gets captured and where it goes.
Use it thoughtfully. Stick to public data. Build in ways that won’t break your business if the tool stops working tomorrow. And remember that the goal isn’t automation for its own sake—it’s automation that helps you make better decisions and write more books.
Your sales rank is sitting there on Amazon right now, being useful to nobody. A robot can go fetch it for you every day and put it somewhere you’ll actually look at it.
That’s pretty cool.
Have you played with Browse AI or built something clever with browser automation? Hit reply and tell me about it—I collect these stories.
Author Automations is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.