YouTube Scraper — Video Metadata, Transcripts & Comments

Extract YouTube video data at scale without an API key or quota limits. This YouTube scraper covers video metadata, keyword search results, channel upload feeds, full video transcripts (including auto-generated captions), and top comments — all in one actor with pay-per-result pricing.

Whether you need to monitor a competitor's channel, feed transcripts into an LLM pipeline, or track video engagement across a topic, this scraper gives you clean structured data with a parse_confidence quality score on every record.

Why use this YouTube scraper instead of the YouTube Data API?

The official YouTube Data API v3 has a daily quota of 10,000 units. A single search call costs 100 units — that's 100 searches per day on the free tier. This actor calls YouTube's internal InnerTube API and parses ytInitialData / ytInitialPlayerResponse directly, with no quota cap and no API key setup.

What you get — 5 scrape modes

• video_details — Full metadata for one or more YouTube videos
• search — Keyword search results with ranking position
• channel_videos — All recent uploads from a YouTube channel
• transcript — Full transcript text with timestamps (auto-generated + manual captions)
• comments — Top comments for a video

Features

• 5 modes: video_details, search, channel_videos, transcript, comments
• No API key: Uses YouTube's internal InnerTube API and HTML parsing
• Transcripts: Full text with timestamps via youtube-transcript-api (handles auto-generated captions)
• parse_confidence: Every record includes a quality score (0.0–1.0) — Apify's daily canary catches silent failures
• PPE pricing: Pay only for results scraped (video-result event per record)

Modes

video_details

Full metadata for one or more YouTube videos.

Input: videoUrls — list of YouTube URLs or bare video IDs.

Output fields: video_id, title, channel, channel_id, views, published, duration_seconds, duration_raw, description, tags, thumbnail, thumbnails, video_url

search

Search YouTube by keyword and return video results.

Input: searchQueries — list of search terms.

Output: Same schema as video_details plus relative published (e.g. "3 weeks ago").

channel_videos

List recent uploads from a YouTube channel.

Input: channels — handles (@freeCodeCamp), channel IDs (UCxxx), or full URLs.

Output: video_id, title, views, published (relative), duration_raw, thumbnail

transcript

Extract full transcript text from a video.

Input: videoUrls, optional transcriptLanguage (default: en).

Output: transcript_text (full joined text), language, is_generated, segment_count

Note: Falls back to auto-generated captions in any language if the requested language is unavailable.

comments

Fetch top comments for a video.

Input: videoUrls, optional maxComments (default: 20).

Output: comment_id, author, text, likes, is_pinned

Proxy

YouTube tolerates datacenter IPs for metadata scraping. Use Apify Proxy (residential) at high volume or if you encounter blocks. Leave proxyConfiguration empty for no proxy.

parse_confidence

Every record includes a parse_confidence field (1.0 = all expected fields present, 0.0 = critical failure). If YouTube changes its HTML structure, confidence drops — giving you a machine-readable drift signal before buyers notice.

Pricing

PPE event: video-result — one charge per record pushed.

Technical notes

• Video metadata: parse ytInitialPlayerResponse from watch-page HTML (no API key needed)
• Search: InnerTube POST /youtubei/v1/search with WEB client context
• Channel videos: parse ytInitialData lockupViewModel from channel page HTML
• Transcripts: youtube-transcript-api library (handles PoToken internally)
• Comments: InnerTube POST /youtubei/v1/next + frameworkUpdates.entityBatchUpdate entity store

Frequently asked questions

Does this YouTube scraper work without an API key?

Yes. The actor uses YouTube's internal InnerTube API and HTML parsing — no API key, no Google Cloud project, no quota limits to manage.

Can I scrape YouTube transcripts for multiple videos at once?

Yes. Pass a list of video URLs or video IDs to videoUrls. Each video generates one transcript record with the full joined text, language code, and whether it's auto-generated.

What happens if a video has no transcript?

The actor sets parse_confidence below 1.0 and includes a warnings entry. Your downstream pipeline can filter on parse_confidence rather than crashing on missing fields.

Is proxy needed?

YouTube tolerates datacenter IPs for most scraping. Leave proxyConfiguration empty for no proxy. At high volume or if you hit CAPTCHAs, switch to Apify RESIDENTIAL proxy.

How is pricing calculated?

This actor uses pay-per-result (PPE). One charge (video-result event) per record pushed to the dataset. Failed lookups, retries, and probe requests are not charged.

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Not affiliated with YouTube or Google.

Integrations

Built for content researchers, competitive analysts, and LLM-pipeline builders extracting video metadata, transcripts, and comments at scale — the JSON/dataset output drops into the tools you already run, no glue code:

• n8n / Make / Zapier — trigger a run or pipe every new dataset item into 500+ apps (Google Sheets, Airtable, Slack, HubSpot, your database) with no code: n8n, Make, Zapier.
• Webhooks — fire your own endpoint the moment a run finishes, to push results straight into your pipeline (docs).
• MCP server — expose this actor as a tool to Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client so an AI agent can pull this data mid-conversation (guide).
• API & SDKs — fetch the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel through the Apify REST API or the Python / JS SDKs.

See all Apify integrations.