⚡ YouTube Trending Scraper — Top Videos by Topic (No Login, No API Key)

Find the most-viewed (viral) YouTube videos for any topic — without a key, a login, or a cookie. Give it a list of topics or keywords and get back the top-performing videos for each: title, view count, channel, published time, duration and full-resolution thumbnail. Export to JSON, CSV or Excel, call it from the API, or have results delivered straight to Notion. Billed per video returned — empty or failed runs cost nothing.

No OAuth. No Data API quota to manage. No browser to babysit. Paste a topic and run.

Why this scraper wins

• 🔓 Truly keyless — talks to YouTube's internal InnerTube API directly. You never supply a Google account, API key, or cookies.
• 📈 Sorted by views — results come back ranked by view count, so the first rows are the actual trending/viral videos for each topic (YouTube retired the old standalone Trending feed; this is the reliable keyless replacement).
• 🧹 Clean, flat output — one tidy record per video, ready for spreadsheets, dashboards or LLM pipelines. No nested InnerTube soup.
• 🔁 Auto-dedupe — the same video is never returned (or charged) twice in a run.
• 📬 Built-in delivery — optionally push every run straight into Notion via Apify connectors, no extra code.
• 🚦 Honest errors — if a topic is blocked or returns nothing, you get a clear diagnostic row (NO_RESULTS, NETWORK, etc.) instead of silent emptiness.
• 💸 Pay per result — only charged for videos actually returned.

What you can collect

Mode	Input	Notes
Top videos by topic	one or more keywords	✅ Fully keyless, sorted by view count
Multi-topic batch	several keywords in one run	✅ Each topic crawled independently, results merged + deduped

Input

Field	Type	Description
keywords	array of strings	Topics/keywords to find the most-viewed videos for (e.g. music, gaming, ai). Required.
maxItems	integer	Cap on total videos collected across all topics (1–2000, default 50). You pay per video.
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy settings. Apify datacenter proxy is fine for YouTube (the default).
notionConnector	string	Optional. Connector ID to deliver results to your connected Notion.
notionParentId	string	Optional. Notion database / data-source ID to write into.

Output (one record per video)

{
  "ok": true,
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "Top Music Video of the Week",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "channelName": "Example Channel",
  "channelId": "UCabc123XYZ",
  "viewCountText": "128,452,901 views",
  "publishedTimeText": "3 weeks ago",
  "lengthText": "4:21",
  "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "mode": "trending"
}

If a topic fails or returns nothing, you get a diagnostic row instead, e.g. { "ok": false, "errorCode": "NO_RESULTS", ... }.

Pricing

$0.40 per 1,000 videos ($0.0004 per video, pay-per-event). You are only charged for videos actually returned — failed or empty runs cost nothing.

FAQ

Do I need a Google account or YouTube Data API key? No. The actor is fully keyless — no account, no OAuth, no quota.

Why topic search instead of a "Trending" tab? YouTube retired its standalone Trending feed. Searching a topic sorted by view count is the reliable keyless way to surface the most-viewed/viral videos, and lets you target any niche.

Why are view counts text ("128,452,901 views")? That's exactly what YouTube's frontend returns. Parse to a number with a quick replace(/\D/g, "") if you need an integer.

Can I get results in Notion? Yes — supply a notionConnector (and optional notionParentId) and every run is delivered automatically via Apify connectors.

A topic returned an errorCode row — why? That's the actor telling you exactly what happened (e.g. NO_RESULTS, NETWORK) instead of failing silently. Retry, rephrase the topic, or switch proxy country.