Stack Overflow Scraper: questions, tags, scores and the question body

Search Stack Overflow and five sibling Stack Exchange sites by keywords, by tags, or by both. Each row is one question: the title, the score, how many answers it has, the view count, its tag list, who asked it and their reputation, and the whole question body as plain text.

Questions only. Answer bodies are not in the output, so if what you actually need is the accepted answer's code, this is the wrong purchase however cheap it is.

Input	Keywords, tags, or both
Output	One row per question
Ceiling	1,000 questions per run
Account needed	None, and no Stack Exchange key
Price	$2.00 per 1,000 questions, flat on every plan

🔍 What Stack Overflow Scraper does

It runs one search and pages through it until it has as many questions as you asked for.

query matches words in titles and bodies. tags filters, and it is an AND: put javascript,promise and you get only questions carrying both, not either. You can use tags on their own with no keywords, which is the cleanest way to pull the top questions in a tag.

sortBy decides the order, and it changes what a small run gives you. votes returns the long-standing classics. creation returns what was asked most recently. activity returns what people are still arguing about. relevance leans on the keyword match.

Six sites are available: Stack Overflow, Server Fault, Super User, Ask Ubuntu, MathOverflow and Software Engineering. One site per run.

📥 What you give it

{
  "query": "async await",
  "tags": "javascript,promise",
  "site": "stackoverflow",
  "sortBy": "votes",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Field	Default	What it is
query	none	Keywords matched against titles and bodies. The Console shows async await as an example, but that is a prefill, so an API call has to send its own.
tags	none	Comma separated, and every tag must be present on the question. The Console prefills javascript, which again does not travel to an API call.
site	stackoverflow	One of stackoverflow, serverfault, superuser, askubuntu, mathoverflow, softwareengineering.
sortBy	votes	votes, relevance, creation or activity. Always highest or newest first.
maxItems	50	1 to 1,000. Paging is automatic, a hundred at a time.
notionConnector	none	Optional. Writes every delivered question into your Notion. Authorise a connector once under Settings, API and Integrations, MCP connectors, then pick it here.
notionParentId	none	Optional. The Notion data source id to write into. Leave it empty and the pages are created privately in your workspace.
proxyConfiguration	off	Optional network setting. Off is right for a normal run.

Send a query, tags, or both. Leaving both empty is not refused, and what comes back then is whatever the site decides to hand over, charged like any other rows. It is the one input mistake here that costs money.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a recent run, with the body cut short here for length:

{
  "ok": true,
  "questionId": 37576685,
  "title": "Using async/await with a forEach loop",
  "url": "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37576685/using-async-await-with-a-foreach-loop",
  "score": 3353,
  "answerCount": 35,
  "viewCount": 2481345,
  "isAnswered": true,
  "tags": ["javascript", "node.js", "promise", "async-await", "ecmascript-2017"],
  "ownerName": "Saad",
  "ownerReputation": 55029,
  "createdAt": "2016-06-01T18:55:58.000Z",
  "body": "Are there any issues with using async/await in a forEach loop? I'm trying to loop through an array of files and await on the contents of each file. ..."
}

Field	What it is
body	The question, converted from HTML to plain text. Code blocks survive as text, indentation mostly does not.
isAnswered	Whether an answer has been accepted. Not the same as answerCount being above zero.
ownerName, ownerReputation	Both null when the account was deleted or the post is anonymous.
score	Net votes, which can be negative.
title	Passed through as the API sends it, so an HTML entity like " can survive into this field. Only body is decoded.
tags	The question's full tag list, which is usually wider than the tags you filtered on.

🧾 Reading the output

Questions carry ok: true. Anything with ok: false carries an errorCode and is not charged.

Code	What it means
NO_RESULTS	The search ran and matched nothing. Usually a tag that does not exist, or two tags no single question carries.
RATE_LIMITED	Stack Exchange asked the run to stop for the day. Whatever was already collected is in the dataset and complete as far as it goes.
NETWORK	Stack Exchange was unreachable or answered with something unusable. Re-run it.

A RATE_LIMITED row after some questions is not a failed run. It means the run delivered what it could and stopped rather than spinning.

The Console's Overview table hides tags, isAnswered and body. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or switch the table to all fields.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Stack Overflow Scraper and click Try for free.
2. Type into Search query, or fill Tags instead, or both.
3. Pick a Stack Exchange site if you want one of the other five.
4. Choose a Sort by order and set Max questions, then click Start.
5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML.

💰 How much does it cost?

$2.00 per 1,000 questions. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

You pay per question row. Duplicates removed inside a run and every diagnostic row are not charged, and a search that matches nothing does not bill for results.

💡 What people use it for

• Finding the questions a product's documentation should have answered, by searching its name and reading what people are stuck on.
• Comparing tag volume between two libraries before committing to one.
• Building an evaluation set for a coding model out of plain-text question bodies.
• Watching a tag weekly with sortBy on creation to see what problems are new.

🚧 What it does not do

• No answers, no comments, no accepted-answer text. answerCount and isAnswered tell you they exist, and the row stops there.
• One site per run. Searching Stack Overflow and Ask Ubuntu together means two runs.
• No date range input. Sort by creation and filter on createdAt afterwards.
• Only six of the network's sites, the ones in the list above.
• Tags are AND, never OR. Three tags usually returns far less than you expect.
• There is a daily ceiling on how much anyone can pull without a key. When it is reached the run stops and says so instead of failing.
• Rows are a snapshot. Scores, views and answer counts move.

🧭 Which developer data scraper do you need?

If you want	Use
Stack Exchange questions, tags and scores	This one
Repositories, stars and issues from GitHub	GitHub Scraper
npm and PyPI package metadata and download counts	Package Registry Scraper
Developer articles and their tags	DEV Community Scraper

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a Stack Exchange API key? No.

Can I search tags without keywords? Yes, and it is the better way to pull a tag's top questions. Leave the query empty and fill tags.

Why did two tags return almost nothing? Because both have to be on the same question. Drop one.

Can I get the answers? Not from this one. Take url from the row and open the question.

Why does my title contain "? The title is passed through as the API sends it. Decode it on your side, or use body, which is already plain text.

Is this legal? Stack Exchange publishes this through a public API meant to be read, and the content is under a Creative Commons licence that asks for attribution. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the query, the tags and the run id. The errorCode on the diagnostic row usually names the problem by itself.