Youtube Scraper

YouTube Search Scraper extracts videos and their full metadata — including comments — from any YouTube search-results page, hashtag feed, or individual video URL. Drop a list of URLs in, and the scraper crawls each result, paginates through comments, and returns clean JSON ready for analysis, dashboards, or downstream pipelines. It runs entirely on Apify, so you get scheduling, API access, proxy rotation, integrations, monitoring, and storage out of the box — no infrastructure to set up.

What does YouTube Search Scraper do?

This Actor takes one or more YouTube URLs (search-results, hashtag pages, or individual videos) and returns a structured JSON record for every video it finds. For each video it extracts:

• Core metadata: title, video ID, canonical URL, thumbnail, duration, upload date, description and description links.
• Engagement metrics: view count, like count, subscriber count of the channel, comment count.
• Channel info: name, channel URL.
• Subtitles: list of available caption language codes.
• Comments: a paginated list of top-level comments (author, text, likes, reply count, published time) capped.
• Status flags: isMonetized, commentsTurnedOff.

To try it, paste a YouTube search URL like https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Apple or a hashtag URL like https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/phimmoi into Start URLs, click Start, and view the dataset under the Output tab.

Why use YouTube Search Scraper?

• Market and trend research — track how a topic, brand, or keyword is being covered on YouTube.
• Competitor and channel analysis — compare view counts, subscribers, and posting cadence across channels.
• Sentiment analysis on comments — pull comment threads and run NLP over real audience reactions.
• Content discovery — surface high-performing videos for a hashtag or keyword to inform your own content strategy.
• Reporting and dashboards — feed structured YouTube data into BI tools without dealing with the YouTube Data API quota.
• No code required — run it from the Apify Console, schedule it, or call it via the API from any language.

How to use YouTube Search Scraper

1. Open the Actor on the Apify Console.
2. In Start URLs, paste one or more URLs. The scraper auto-detects the type:
   • Search: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=<query>
   • Hashtag: https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/<tag>
   • Single video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<id> (or youtu.be/<id> / youtube.com/shorts/<id>)
3. Set Max items to control how many videos to extract per search/hashtag URL (default 100).
4. Click Start and wait for the run to finish.
5. Open the Output tab to view the dataset, or download it as JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, or RSS.

Input

Field	Type	Description	Default
startUrls	array	One or more YouTube URLs (search-results, hashtag, or individual video). Mixed types are supported in the same run.	https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Apple
maxItems	integer	Maximum number of video items to extract per search or hashtag URL. The scraper scrolls to load more results until this cap is hit.	100

Output

Output is stored as JSON in the Actor's default dataset. One item per video. You can download the dataset in JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, or RSS formats from the Output tab.

{
  "title": "Stromae - Santé (Live From The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon)",
  "id": "CW7gfrTlr0Y",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW7gfrTlr0Y",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/CW7gfrTlr0Y/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "viewCount": 35582192,
  "date": "2021-12-21",
  "likes": 512238,
  "location": null,
  "channelName": "StromaeVEVO",
  "channelUrl": "http://www.youtube.com/@StromaeVEVO",
  "numberOfSubscribers": 6930000,
  "duration": "00:03:17",
  "commentsCount": 14,
  "text": "Stromae - Santé (Live From The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on NBC)...",
  "descriptionLinks": [
    { "url": "https://stromae.lnk.to/la-solassitude", "text": "https://stromae.lnk.to/la-solassitude" }
  ],
  "subtitles": ["en", "fr"],
  "comments": [
    {
      "id": "Ugw...",
      "author": "@some_user",
      "authorChannelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC...",
      "text": "Absolute masterpiece.",
      "publishedAt": "2 years ago",
      "likes": 1240,
      "replyCount": 3
    }
  ],
  "isMonetized": true,
  "commentsTurnedOff": false
}

Data fields

Field	Type	Description
title	string	Video title.
id	string	Unique YouTube video ID.
url	string	Canonical watch?v= URL.
thumbnailUrl	string	High-resolution thumbnail (maxresdefault.jpg).
viewCount	integer	Total view count.
date	string	Upload date in YYYY-MM-DD format.
likes	integer	Like count parsed from the video page.
location	string | null	Geotag, when the uploader has set one (rare).
channelName	string	Display name of the channel.
channelUrl	string	Channel URL.
numberOfSubscribers	integer	Subscriber count (e.g., 6.93M is normalized to 6930000).
duration	string	Duration formatted as HH:MM:SS.
commentsCount	integer	Total comments on the video.
text	string	Full description text.
descriptionLinks	array	All external links from the description (YouTube redirect wrappers are unwrapped).
subtitles	array | null	Available caption language codes.
comments	array | null	Top-level comments ({ id, author, authorChannelUrl, text, publishedAt, likes, replyCount }).
isMonetized	boolean	Heuristic — true when the video has ad placements.
commentsTurnedOff	boolean | null	true when comments are disabled on the video.

Tips and advanced options

• Mix URL types in one run. Search URLs, hashtag URLs, and individual video URLs can all live in the same startUrls array. The scraper auto-routes each one.
• Tune concurrency in the source if needed. The crawler is configured with maxConcurrency: 2 because each browser tab needs enough resources for YouTube's lazy-loaded comments to render. Pushing concurrency higher tends to produce empty commentsCount fields under load.
• Use a proxy on the platform. A residential or datacenter Apify Proxy (useApifyProxy: true) is recommended for sustained crawls to avoid rate limits.

FAQ and disclaimers

Is this legal? This scraper only collects publicly visible data from YouTube — content that any signed-out user can see in their browser. You are responsible for complying with YouTube's Terms of Service and applicable law (including local data protection rules) for your specific use case.

Why is commentsCount sometimes null? YouTube lazy-loads the comments panel; if the page is unusually slow to render the comments header within the wait window, the field falls back to whatever the network listener captured (or null if nothing was captured). Lower the maxConcurrency or rerun with a proxy if this is frequent.

Why is date an approximation on some videos? Search-result pages only expose relative timestamps ("2 years ago"). The detail page returns the exact publishDate, so videos scraped via the detail handler get the precise date.

Found a bug or want a feature? Use the Issues tab on the Actor page in the Apify Console to report problems or request enhancements.