YouTube Channel Search Scraper

What is YouTube Channel Search Scraper?

YouTube Channel Search Scraper is a tool that lets you find YouTube channels by keyword and scrape each channel's subscribers, exact video and view counts, joined date, country, description, links, keywords, verified badge and whether it lists a business e-mail. Type your topics, click Start, and download the channels as Excel, CSV or JSON.

• ⚡ Speed: about 2,000 channels per minute (1,000 channels from 10 search terms in 29 seconds in our test)
• 🔎 Deep searches: usually 700 to 800 channels for one search term
• 📊 Spreadsheet-ready: one flat row per channel, with the joined date as a real date
• 🔓 No login: no YouTube account, cookies or API key needed

What can YouTube Channel Search Scraper do?

• Find YouTube channels by keyword, niche or product, hundreds of search terms in one run
• Build YouTube influencer lists filtered by subscriber count, video count and verified badge
• Get each channel's subscriber count, exact video count and exact total views
• Get the channel creation date, country, description, keywords and links to websites and social profiles
• See which channels list a business e-mail for sponsorship outreach
• Re-run any YouTube search URL, including its filters
• Leave out channels you already know, and never get the same channel twice in a run
• Get results in seconds over the real-time API, without starting a run
• Export to Excel, CSV, JSON, HTML or XML, or send them to Google Sheets, Make, Zapier and more

What data can you extract from YouTube channels?

📺 Channel name	🆔 Channel ID	🏷️ Handle
🔗 Channel link	👥 Subscribers	🎬 Number of videos
👁️ Total views	📅 Joined date	🌍 Country
📝 Description	🔑 Keywords	🌐 Website and social links
✔️ Verified badge	✉️ Business e-mail listed	🖼️ Picture and banner
📡 RSS feed	🔎 Search term that found it	🎞️ Video that led to it

How to scrape YouTube channels by keyword

1. Create a free Apify account (no credit card needed).
2. Open YouTube Channel Search Scraper.
3. Add one or more search terms, for example coffee roasting or personal finance, or paste YouTube search links.
4. Click Start.
5. When the run finishes, download the channels as Excel, CSV, JSON, HTML or XML.

⬇️ Input

Setting	What it does
Find channels by	Channel results and video results (the most channels), Channel results (what YouTube lists under the Channels filter) or Video results (the channels behind the videos a search finds)
Search terms	Topics, products or kinds of creators to search for
YouTube search URLs	YouTube search pages, such as https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chess. A page with a filter (for example Channels, Playlists or This week) is searched with that filter; for playlists you get the channels that made them
Channels per search	Stop after this many channels for each search term or URL. Leave it empty to get every channel YouTube lists
Total channels	Stop after this many channels in the whole run
Minimum / Maximum subscribers	Only channels in this subscriber range
Minimum videos	Only channels with at least this many videos
Verified channels only	Only channels with YouTube's verified badge
Excluded channels	Channels to leave out, as @handle, a handle link or a /channel/UC... link
Search language / Search country	The language and country YouTube searches for, such as en and US

Channels left out by the filters are not saved and not charged, and they do not count toward your limits.

Example:

{
  "searchTerms": ["coffee roasting", "home espresso"],
  "discoveryMode": "both",
  "maxChannelsPerSearchTerm": 200,
  "minSubscribers": 10000,
  "maxSubscribers": 500000,
  "excludedChannels": ["@JamesHoffmann"]
}

⬆️ Output

You get one row per channel. You can view them as a table in Apify Console or download them as Excel, CSV, JSON, HTML or XML. Fields a channel does not show (for example, a country) are empty.

{
  "channelId": "UCLe_q9axMaeTbjN0hy1Z9xA",
  "handle": "@CalebHammer",
  "title": "Caleb Hammer",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/@CalebHammer",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLe_q9axMaeTbjN0hy1Z9xA",
  "description": "Having the conversations that I wish someone had with me over a decade ago...",
  "isVerified": true,
  "isFamilySafe": true,
  "subscribers": 3830000,
  "subscriberText": "3.83M subscribers",
  "subscriberCountIsExact": false,
  "videos": 4894,
  "videoText": "4,894 videos",
  "totalViews": 4481734366,
  "totalViewText": "4,481,734,366 views",
  "country": "United States",
  "joinedDate": "2020-05-20",
  "joinedText": "Joined May 20, 2020",
  "hasBusinessEmail": true,
  "externalLinks": [
    {"title": "Website", "url": "https://www.calebhammer.com"},
    {"title": "Stan Store", "url": "https://stan.store/calebhammer"}
  ],
  "keywords": ["personal finance", "budgeting", "financial education", "dave ramsey"],
  "rssUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCLe_q9axMaeTbjN0hy1Z9xA",
  "avatarUrl": "https://yt3.googleusercontent.com/gW5N5sL574VGFhCfRXh5Hkmr2B3f6iQZ...=s900-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj",
  "bannerUrl": "https://yt3.googleusercontent.com/hpHDjaIDPLk12AjY8eUpo1syn0zmK62m...=w2560-fcrop64=1,00005a57ffffa5a8-k-c0xffffffff-no-nd-rj",
  "source": "personal finance",
  "sourceKind": "keyword",
  "discoverySurface": "video_results",
  "rank": 23,
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=personal+finance&hl=en&gl=US&sp=CAMSAhAB",
  "sourceVideo": {
    "videoId": "XT02_pqmbeM",
    "title": "I Finally Snapped | Financial Audit",
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT02_pqmbeM",
    "publishedText": "2 months ago",
    "viewText": "2,611,287 views"
  },
  "fetchedAt": "2026-09-26T07:29:30Z"
}

source, discoverySurface, rank and sourceUrl tell you where the run first found the channel. sourceVideo is the video that led to it when it was found in video results, and empty when it was found in channel results.

Each run also saves a short report with how many search terms it covered and any search it could not complete, with the reason.

How can I use YouTube channel data?

• Influencer discovery: find creators in your niche and sort them by subscribers, views and videos
• Sponsorship and outreach lists: keep the channels that list a business e-mail, a website or social links
• Competitor research: map every channel publishing about your product category
• Market research: see how many channels cover a topic, how big they are and where they are based
• Lead generation: build lists of brands and agencies active on YouTube, with their websites
• Tracking new creators: run the same searches on a schedule and compare channels and counts over time

How to find YouTube influencers in a niche

1. Add a few search terms that describe the niche, for example vegan recipes, plant based meal prep.
2. Choose Channel results and video results to find the most channels.
3. Set Minimum subscribers and Maximum subscribers to the audience size you want, for example 10,000 to 500,000.
4. Add channels you already work with to Excluded channels.
5. Start the run and sort the table by subscribers, or filter on hasBusinessEmail to see who accepts business inquiries.

Real-time YouTube channel search API

Need channels right away inside your app? Call the actor's API and get them back in the response, without starting a run:

GET https://<your-actor-standby-url>/search?term=coffee%20roasting&limit=20&minSubscribers=10000
Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>

term can also be a YouTube search link. The same filters are available: mode, minSubscribers, maxSubscribers, minVideos, verifiedOnly, language and country.

You can also run the actor from your own code with the Apify API or the Python and JavaScript clients:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("automly/youtube-channel-search-scraper").call(run_input={
    "searchTerms": ["coffee roasting", "home espresso"],
    "maxChannelsPerSearchTerm": 100,
    "minSubscribers": 5000,
})
for channel in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(channel["title"], channel["subscribers"], channel["country"], channel["url"])

❓FAQ

How much does it cost to scrape YouTube channels?

You pay only for the channels you get, per 1,000 channels. Channels left out by your filters are not charged. See the Pricing tab for the current price. Every Apify account gets $5 of free usage each month, so you can try it at no cost.

How many channels can I get from one search term?

Usually 700 to 800 channels for a popular topic when you find channels by channel results and video results, and about 450 with channel results only. That is how many different channels YouTube itself lists for the search. Narrow topics give fewer. Add more search terms (synonyms, related products, other languages) to find more channels; a channel found by several terms is saved once.

Why is the subscriber count approximate?

YouTube shows the exact number only for channels under 1,000 subscribers. Above that it shows a rounded number, such as "3.83M". You get it as a number (3830000) you can sort and filter, subscriberText as YouTube shows it, and subscriberCountIsExact tells you whether the number is exact. Video counts and total views are exact numbers.

Can I get the business e-mail address of a channel?

No. YouTube shows the address only to signed-in viewers, and this scraper does not sign in. hasBusinessEmail tells you whether the channel lists one, so you know which channels accept business inquiries through YouTube. Many channels also list a website or social profiles, which you get in externalLinks.

Why is the subscriber count empty for some channels?

Some channels hide their subscriber count. Their rows have every other field, and they are left out when you set a subscriber filter.

Can I use a YouTube search link instead of keywords?

Yes. Paste links like https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chess&sp=EgIQAg%253D%253D into YouTube search URLs. A link with a filter (Channels, Videos, upload date, sort order) is searched with exactly that filter.

Can I search in another language or country?

Yes. Set Search language (for example de) and Search country (for example DE). Channel counts and dates stay in the same format whatever the language, so filters and spreadsheets work the same.

Do I need a YouTube account or API key?

No. You don't need a YouTube account, cookies or a YouTube Data API key, and there is no daily quota.

Is it legal to scrape YouTube channels?

This scraper only collects information that channels show publicly to every visitor. It does not collect private data such as e-mail addresses. Channel pages can still contain personal data, which may be protected by laws such as GDPR, so only scrape it for a legitimate reason and ask a lawyer if you are unsure. You can read more in Is web scraping legal?

YouTube Channel Search Scraper is an independent tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by YouTube or Google.

Something isn't working. What should I do?

Open the Issues tab and tell us the search term and what you expected. We usually reply within a day.