YouTube Scraper - Channels, Videos, Search, Shorts & Transcript

✅ Tested daily with its default input (Apify's automated QA plus our own smoke test before every release).

YouTube scraper without an API key or quota. Give it search keywords, channels, playlists or single video links and get clean JSON for every video: title, full description, exact publish date, duration, views, likes, tags, category, channel name and subscriber count, Shorts and live flags. Channels come back as their own record with subscribers, video count, total views, country and the links shown on the channel page. Captions can be added as a transcript in the same run.

$0.0033 per result (video or channel record), lower on higher Apify plans. The date filter is included, no add-on fee.

What you can scrape

• YouTube search: videos, Shorts or channels for any keyword, with YouTube's own filters (sort by relevance or popularity, upload date, video length)
• Channel videos: the Videos, Shorts and Live tabs of any channel, newest first, by URL, @handle or channel ID
• Video details: any list of video URLs or IDs (watch, youtu.be, shorts, live, embed)
• Playlists: all videos of a playlist in playlist order
• Transcripts (optional): the captions of each video as plain text plus timestamped segments

Why this scraper

• Complete video records: exact publish timestamp, exact view count, likes, tags and category for every video, not only what the result list shows
• Subscriber count on every video: looked up once per channel and reused
• Cutoff date that saves money: with publishedAfter the channel tabs stop paging as soon as older videos appear, so you only pay for what you keep
• Light and fast: reads YouTube's public JSON data, nothing is downloaded (no video, no thumbnails). 100 results usually take 10 to 20 seconds
• Works around blocking automatically: requests go out directly first; if YouTube blocks them the Actor switches to Apify datacenter proxy and, only if still needed, to residential proxy. Proxy cost is included in the price
• Deduplicated output: a video found by two queries or sources is delivered (and charged) once

Input

Field	Default	Description
searchQueries	–	Keywords to search
searchType	video	video, shorts or channel
maxResultsPerQuery	20	Results per search query
sortBy	relevance	relevance or popularity
uploadDate	any	today, week, month, year
duration	any	short (< 3 min), medium (3-20 min), long (> 20 min)
channels	–	Channel URLs, @handles or UC... IDs
channelVideos / channelShorts / channelStreams	true / false / false	Which channel tabs to scrape
maxResultsPerChannel	20	Videos per channel and per tab
publishedAfter	–	YYYY-MM-DD or relative, e.g. 7 days, 3 months
videoUrls	–	Single videos for full details
playlists	–	Playlist URLs or IDs
maxResultsPerPlaylist	50	Videos per playlist
videoDetails	true	Exact date, likes, tags, category, full description (false = list data only, faster)
channelInfo	true	Subscriber count on videos + one record per input channel
includeTranscript	false	Add captions ($0.0049 per transcript)
transcriptLanguage	en	Preferred caption language(s), e.g. de,en

Example:

{
  "searchQueries": ["web scraping tutorial"],
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 50,
  "channels": ["@GoogleDevelopers"],
  "channelShorts": true,
  "maxResultsPerChannel": 100,
  "publishedAfter": "30 days"
}

Output

Video record:

{
  "type": "video",
  "id": "SOF3_evPje8",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOF3_evPje8",
  "title": "Design and replicate voices with Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS",
  "description": "See how Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS lets you design custom voices ...",
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-21T12:00:23-07:00",
  "duration": 849,
  "views": 26389,
  "likes": 260,
  "channelName": "Google for Developers",
  "channelId": "UC_x5XG1OV2P6uZZ5FSM9Ttw",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_x5XG1OV2P6uZZ5FSM9Ttw",
  "channelHandle": "@GoogleDevelopers",
  "channelSubscribers": 2680000,
  "tags": ["Google", "developers"],
  "category": "Science & Technology",
  "thumbnails": [{"quality": "hqdefault", "url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SOF3_evPje8/hqdefault.jpg"}],
  "isShort": false,
  "isLive": false,
  "source": {"type": "channel", "channel": "@GoogleDevelopers", "tab": "videos"}
}

Channel record:

{
  "type": "channel",
  "channelId": "UC_x5XG1OV2P6uZZ5FSM9Ttw",
  "name": "Google for Developers",
  "handle": "@GoogleDevelopers",
  "subscribers": 2680000,
  "videoCount": 6120,
  "totalViews": 366512479,
  "joinedDate": "Aug 22, 2007",
  "country": "United States",
  "description": "Welcome to Google for Developers! ...",
  "links": [{"title": "Website", "url": "https://developers.google.com"}]
}

Subscriber counts are as YouTube displays them publicly (rounded, e.g. 2.68M). Likes are empty when the creator hides them. With includeTranscript a video also gets transcript, transcriptSegments (start/end in seconds), transcriptLanguage and transcriptIsAutoGenerated.

Pricing (pay per event)

• $0.0033 per result (one video or one channel record); $0.0028 on Silver, $0.00231 on Gold and above
• $0.0049 per transcript delivered (optional; videos without captions are not charged for it)
• Inputs that fail (unknown channel, private video) are free

So 1,000 videos with full details and subscriber counts cost $3.30 on the free plan. Set the max-results fields or a maximum cost per run to cap spending.

What this Actor does not collect

Only public video and channel metadata. No comments, no subscriber lists, no e-mail addresses or other contact data, no login, no video or audio download. Make sure your use of the data follows YouTube's terms and applicable law.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

This Actor can be used as a tool by AI agents (Claude, Cursor, VS Code, other MCP clients) through the official Apify MCP server:

• Add only this Actor as a tool: https://mcp.apify.com?tools=admirala/youtube-scraper (sign in with OAuth or an Apify API token).
• Or connect https://mcp.apify.com and let the agent find it with search-actors (e.g. "youtube scraper channel videos"), read the input schema with fetch-actor-details and run it with call-actor.

Example input an agent can pass:

{
  "searchQueries": ["best budget laptop 2026"],
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 20,
  "sortBy": "popularity"
}

Cost per call: $0.0033 per video or channel returned (plus $0.0049 per transcript if includeTranscript is true). Results come back as dataset items (get-dataset-items).

FAQ

Do I need a YouTube Data API key? No. The Actor reads the same public data the YouTube website loads, so there is no API key and no daily quota.

How do I scrape all videos of a YouTube channel? Put the channel URL or @handle in channels and set maxResultsPerChannel high enough (e.g. 5000). Turn on channelShorts and channelStreams to include Shorts and live streams.

How do I get only recent videos? Set publishedAfter to a date (2026-10-01) or a period (7 days). Channel scraping stops at the first older video, so you are not charged for old ones.

Can I scrape YouTube Shorts? Yes: set searchType to shorts for Shorts search results, or enable channelShorts for a channel's Shorts tab. Every video has an isShort flag.

Can I get the transcript of each video? Yes, enable includeTranscript. It uses the video's existing captions (creator-made or auto-generated) and costs $0.0049 per transcript. For transcripts only, use the dedicated YouTube Transcript Scraper below.

Does it download videos or thumbnails? No. Thumbnail URLs are returned, nothing is downloaded.

Related actors

• YouTube Transcript Scraper - Text, Timestamps & SRT
• YouTube Transcript & Audio to Text (Whisper) - SRT/VTT
• Podcast Transcription - RSS Feed to Text, SRT & VTT

More examples

Ready-to-run Python, curl and MCP examples with real sample output: https://github.com/AdmiraalA/apify-scrapers-examples