Stack Overflow Scraper

Search and extract Stack Overflow questions with scores, answers, tags, view counts, and author information. Find the most popular programming questions on any topic.

What does Stack Overflow Scraper do?

Stack Overflow Scraper uses the StackExchange API to search and extract questions from Stack Overflow. For each question, it returns the title, vote score, answer count, view count, tags, creation date, and author details.

Sort results by relevance, votes, creation date, or recent activity. Filter by tags to narrow results to specific technologies.

Who is Stack Overflow Scraper for?

• 💻 Software developers researching solutions to programming problems
• 🤖 AI/ML engineers curating Q&A datasets for RAG pipelines or LLM training
• 📝 Technical writers identifying common developer pain points for documentation
• 📊 Developer advocates tracking community questions about their frameworks
• 🏢 Engineering managers analyzing technology trends and developer challenges
• 🎓 Educators building curated collections of programming exercises and explanations
• 📈 Market researchers studying technology adoption through developer questions

Why scrape Stack Overflow?

Stack Overflow has 23+ million questions covering every programming topic. Use cases include:

• 🔍 Developer research — find the most upvoted solutions for any programming problem
• 📊 Content analysis — study popular questions, trending topics, and technology adoption
• 📝 Documentation gaps — identify frequently asked questions to improve your docs
• 🤖 Training data — build datasets of programming Q&A for LLM fine-tuning, RAG pipelines, or AI coding assistants
• 🏁 Competitive analysis — track questions about your framework or library
• 👥 Hiring insights — analyze what technologies developers struggle with most

Data extraction fields

Field	Type	Description
questionId	number	Stack Overflow question ID
title	string	Question title
score	number	Net vote score (upvotes - downvotes)
answerCount	number	Number of answers
viewCount	number	Total view count
isAnswered	boolean	Whether the question has an upvoted answer
hasAcceptedAnswer	boolean	Whether the author accepted an answer
tags	string[]	Associated technology tags
creationDate	string	When the question was posted
lastActivityDate	string	Last edit or answer activity
url	string	Direct link to the question
authorName	string	Question author's display name
authorReputation	number	Author's reputation score
authorUrl	string	Author's profile URL
scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of extraction

How much does it cost to scrape Stack Overflow?

Stack Overflow Scraper uses pay-per-event pricing:

Event	Price
Run started	$0.001
Question extracted	$0.001 per question

Example costs:

• 20 top React questions: ~$0.021
• 100 Python questions: ~$0.101
• 300 questions across 3 topics: ~$0.301

Platform costs are minimal. The StackExchange API is free (300 requests/day without API key).

How to scrape Stack Overflow questions

1. Go to Stack Overflow Scraper on Apify Store.
2. Enter one or more search keywords in the searchQueries field (e.g., react hooks, python asyncio).
3. Optionally filter by tags (e.g., javascript;react) and choose a sort order.
4. Set the maximum number of results per keyword.
5. Click Start and wait for results.
6. Download data as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Input parameters

Parameter	Type	Description	Default
searchQueries	string[]	Keywords to search on Stack Overflow	Required
tagged	string	Filter by tags (semicolon-separated, e.g. javascript;react)	—
sortBy	string	Sort: relevance, votes, creation, activity	relevance
maxResults	integer	Maximum questions per keyword (1-300)	50

Input example

{
  "searchQueries": ["react hooks", "python asyncio"],
  "sortBy": "votes",
  "maxResults": 20
}

Output example

Each question is returned as a JSON object:

{
  "questionId": 53219858,
  "title": "How to fix missing dependency warning when using useEffect React Hook",
  "score": 890,
  "answerCount": 26,
  "viewCount": 1252100,
  "isAnswered": true,
  "hasAcceptedAnswer": true,
  "tags": ["reactjs", "react-hooks", "eslint"],
  "creationDate": "2018-11-09T08:45:12.000Z",
  "lastActivityDate": "2026-01-15T12:30:00.000Z",
  "url": "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53219858",
  "authorName": "Andru",
  "authorReputation": 5234,
  "authorUrl": "https://stackoverflow.com/users/123456/andru",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-03-03T05:02:00.000Z"
}

Tips and best practices

1. 🏆 Sort by votes — use votes sorting to find the most authoritative answers.
2. 🏷️ Tag filtering — use tagged to narrow to specific technologies (e.g., python;pandas).
3. 👀 View count — high view counts indicate common problems many developers face.
4. 🔄 API quota — the free tier allows 300 API requests/day. Each page of results = 1 request.
5. 📊 Max 300 results — the API limits unauthenticated search to ~300 results per query.
6. ⭐ Score interpretation — scores above 100 indicate widely-appreciated questions; above 500 is exceptional.

Integrations

Connect Stack Overflow Scraper to apps:

• 📊 Google Sheets — export Q&A data for analysis
• 🔔 Slack — notifications for new popular questions in your tech stack
• ⚡ Zapier / Make — automate workflows with developer Q&A data
• 🔗 Webhook — send results to your own API

How to use Stack Overflow Scraper with the API

Node.js

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_API_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('automation-lab/stackoverflow-scraper').call({
    searchQueries: ['python machine learning'],
    sortBy: 'votes',
    maxResults: 50,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach(q => {
    console.log(`[${q.score}] ${q.title} (${q.viewCount} views)`);
});

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_API_TOKEN")

run = client.actor("automation-lab/stackoverflow-scraper").call(run_input={
    "searchQueries": ["python machine learning"],
    "sortBy": "votes",
    "maxResults": 50,
})

for q in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    answered = "✓" if q["isAnswered"] else " "
    print(f"{answered} score={q['score']:4d} views={q['viewCount']:7d} {q['title'][:60]}")

cURL

curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/automation-lab~stackoverflow-scraper/runs" \
  -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"searchQueries": ["react hooks"], "sortBy": "votes", "maxResults": 20}'

Use with AI agents via MCP

Stack Overflow Scraper is available as a tool for AI assistants via the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Setup for Claude Code

$claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com"

Setup for Claude Desktop, Cursor, or VS Code

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com"
        }
    }
}

Example prompts

• "Find top Stack Overflow questions about Python async"
• "Get the most voted questions about React hooks"
• "Search Stack Overflow for questions tagged rust about memory safety"

Learn more in the Apify MCP documentation.

Is it legal to scrape Stack Overflow?

This scraper uses the official StackExchange API, not web scraping. The StackExchange API is publicly available and designed for programmatic access. All data returned is publicly visible on Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow content is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, which allows sharing and adaptation with proper attribution. If you republish the data, you must provide attribution to the original authors and Stack Overflow.

Legality

Scraping publicly available data is generally legal according to the US Court of Appeals ruling (HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn). This actor only accesses publicly available information and does not require authentication. Always review and comply with the target website's Terms of Service before scraping. For personal data, ensure compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and other applicable privacy regulations.

FAQ

Q: Does it return the answer text? A: This scraper returns question metadata. The question URL links directly to the full page with all answers.

Q: Is an API key required? A: No. The StackExchange API works without authentication (300 requests/day limit).

Q: Can I search other StackExchange sites? A: This scraper is configured for Stack Overflow specifically.

Q: How current is the data? A: Data is real-time from the StackExchange API.

Q: I'm getting fewer results than maxResults — why? A: The StackExchange API may return fewer results if your search query is too specific or if the daily API quota (300 requests) has been reached. Try broader keywords or wait for the quota to reset.

Q: Results seem outdated or missing recent questions — what can I do? A: Sort by activity instead of votes to surface recently active questions. The default relevance sorting may favor older, highly-voted questions.

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