Claude scrapes Substack rankings weekly; Cowork writes the report
Tracking which newsletters break into Substack's top 200 meant clicking and copy-pasting. Claude in Chrome now scrapes the charts every Tuesday, and Cowork turns the data into a spreadsheet report.
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
Every week the writer tracks which Substack newsletters break into the top 200. They had Claude scrape the Substack charts into a table of ranking, newsletter, date and free or paid type, then turned that prompt into a scheduled task that runs every Tuesday. A second Cowork task analyzes the folder of collected data for the biggest rank gains, new entrants and biggest rank losses.
How it went
Cowork drops a spreadsheet with the full analysis into their folder. They note that scheduled tasks only run while the computer is awake and the Claude Desktop app is open, and that each one draws on the plan’s usage allowance.
Try it yourself with Claude
Build a table with these columns for the first [number] elements in the table at [chart URL]: Ranking, Newsletter, Date (today's date), Type = free/paid. Give me a link to download the file in csv format. Then, using the data collected in the folder [folder name], analyze the biggest rank gains, the new entrants and the biggest rank losses, separately for each dataset, and save the analysis as a spreadsheet in the folder. Show me the plan before you start.
A starting prompt written by Agents in the Wild. Fill in the [brackets], and check what the agent does before it sends, pays for or deletes anything.
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