Telegram Channel Scraper & Channels Search (messages, views)

Scrape any public Telegram channel and search Telegram channels by keyword, with no account, no bot token, no API key and no phone number. The actor reads Telegram's own public previews, so nothing of yours is ever logged in or at risk.

What you get

One row per message, real values from the example dataset (channel durov, text truncated here):

url	text	views	author
https://t.me/durov/546	🏳️ Gram Wallet in Telegram is ready and is now accessible to a select group of users…	1040000 (viewsText 1.04M)	Pavel Durov

includeChannelInfo also emits one type: channel row per channel: title Pavel Durov, description Founder of Telegram., subscribersText 10.9M, photosText/videosText/linksText 102/46/198.

Full message row: channel, messageId, url, text, html, postedAt, views, viewsText, author, forwardedFrom, replyTo, images[], videos[], links[], linkPreviewTitle, linkPreviewUrl, hasMedia, isService, scrapedAt.

Use cases

• Topic discovery — search by keyword and get each matching channel's subscriber count and description before you decide to follow it.
• Brand and market monitoring — watch a set of channels and get alerted on every new post that matches a regex or clears a view threshold.
• News, OSINT and signal work — archive a channel's public messages with dates, views, links and forwarded-from attribution.

Try it in 10 seconds

Hit Start/Try it — the input already works: channels: ["durov"], maxMessages: 100, maxItems: 20, nothing required. Swap in your own channel username or a searches keyword and run again.

To watch a channel over time: save the input as a Task, set mode to monitor, and put it on a schedule (Apify → Schedules → cron */30 * * * * for every 30 minutes). Each run then returns only messages that are new since last time, and can post them to webhookUrl or Telegram.

Related actors

• Telegram Channel Search Scraper (topic, subscribers, no login) — a dedicated topic search with subscriber-size filters, if you only need to shortlist channels, not their messages.
• Facebook Groups Search Scraper (members, privacy, no login) — the same keyword discovery, but for Facebook groups.
• Reddit Scraper (subreddit posts, search, comments, no login) — a subreddit-based alternative when the discussion lives on Reddit instead of Telegram.

How it works

1. Channels → each t.me/<name> public preview is paged backwards, newest first (about 20 messages per request), until maxMessages is reached.
2. Searches → keywords are looked up in a public web index restricted to t.me, and each matching channel is returned as a type: channel row with subscribers and description.
3. keywordFilter and minViews are applied before rows are pushed, so you are not charged for messages you filtered out.
4. No proxy is required — Telegram serves these previews to anyone.

Input

Field	Meaning	Default
channels	Usernames or t.me links of public channels, e.g. durov	["durov"]
searches	Keywords → matching public channels	empty
maxMessages	Messages per channel, newest first	100
includeChannelInfo	Emit one type: channel row per channel	true
keywordFilter	Regex; keep only messages whose text matches	empty
minViews	Skip messages with fewer views	empty
searchResults	How many channels to return per search keyword	20
maxItems	Stop after this many rows	20
mode	scrape or monitor (only new/changed since last run)	scrape
monitorStateId, webhookUrl, telegramBotToken, telegramChatId	Monitor-mode state key and alert targets	empty

Pricing

Event	Price
result	$0.001 per row ($1 per 1,000)
monitor-check	$0.005 per monitor run
change	$0.001 per new/changed row

Charged only for rows actually pushed. No proxy needed.

Found it useful? A short review on the Store page helps other people find this actor and tells us what to improve. If something is wrong, open an issue on the actor page — issues are answered within a day.

Why this actor

• No account, no bot token, no API key, no phone number — nothing of yours can be rate-limited or banned.
• Channel discovery and message scraping in one actor: search a topic, then read the channels you found.
• Regex and minimum-view filters run before billing, so you pay only for messages you keep.
• No proxy cost, unlike scrapers that route Telegram through residential IPs.
• Monitor mode with webhook and Telegram alerts on new posts.

Limits

• Only channels with public previews (most public channels; private groups, restricted or age-gated channels are not available).
• Comments and reactions are not included. Search uses a public web index, so very new or tiny channels may not be found.
• views is what Telegram shows on the public preview at scrape time.

FAQ

Does it need a Telegram account, a phone number or an API key? No. It reads t.me public previews, the same pages any browser sees. The optional Telegram bot token in the input is only for sending yourself monitor-mode alerts and is never used to read channels.

Can it find channels by topic, or do I need the exact username? Both. Put keywords in searches to discover channels for a topic — you get one row per channel with subscribers and description — or put known usernames in channels to read their messages.

What happens when there are no results? No rows are pushed and no result events are charged. The RUN_SUMMARY record in the run's key-value store carries emptyReason, so "the filter matched nothing" is distinguishable from "the channel has no public preview".

Changelog

• 0.1: initial release.