🎯 YouTube Channels Scraper 📺

📌 What does YouTube Channels Scraper do?

This actor finds YouTube channel information from a search query. It expands your query using YouTube suggestions, loads YouTube search pages for those terms, and extracts basic channel metadata. The result is a compact dataset you can download from the Apify Storage tab.

• 🔎 Expands a query with YouTube suggestions
• 🧾 Extracts channel metadata from search pages (name, channel id/handle, thumbnail)
• 🔁 Normalizes and deduplicates results
• 📦 Returns a JSON object with the query and a list of results

Note: the repository also contains additional handler functions for video-level parsing (see src/api/handlers-core.js and src/lib/core.js) that can be used programmatically or wired into a custom entrypoint.

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💡 How to use scraped data

You can use the scraped channel metadata to:

• Monitor channel search visibility and discover channels related to a topic
• Aggregate public channel information for analytics and reporting
• Seed other automations or workflows with channel handles and thumbnails

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🔎 What data does the actor return?

From the search results (per matched term) you'll typically get:

• channel name
• channel id or handle
• channel URL (when available)
• channel thumbnail URL
• the search term that produced the match

(If you reuse the video handlers present in the codebase, they produce video-level metadata such as id, title, thumbnail, duration, published timestamp and view counts.)

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⬆️ Input example

Provide input via the Apify Console or directly as JSON. Minimal example:

{
  "q": "lofi girl",
  "processLimit": 30,
  "maxResults": 5
}

• q (required): search query
• processLimit (optional): how many suggestion terms to process (default 30)
• maxResults (optional): how many channels to return (default 5)

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🧰 Specialized scrapers and related tools

• 💬 Fast YouTube Videos Scraper
• 🏎 Fast YouTube Channel Scraper
• ▶️ Fast YouTube Channel Videos Scraper
• 📽️ Fast YouTube Channel Videos Scraper Fallback

You can combine results with other social media scrapers (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook) or feed data to AI agents (e.g., sentiment analysis, influencer discovery).

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⬇️ Example output (channels)

[
  {
    "term": "lofi girl",
    "info": {
      "name": "Lofi Girl",
      "channelId": "UC...",
      "thumbnail": "https://yt3.ggpht.com/...",
      "handle": "@LofiGirl"
    }
  }
]

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🧭 How it works (brief)

1. Calls Google Suggest for YouTube to get related query terms.
2. Loads YouTube search pages for each term and parses channel renderers from the page HTML.
3. Normalizes names and deduplicates by name/thumbnail before returning the top results.

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❓ FAQ

• Is a proxy required? For reliable scraping at scale, proxies are recommended.
• Is scraping legal? Scraping public data is generally lawful but you must comply with copyright and data protection regulations (GDPR etc.). Consult legal advice for uncertain cases.

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🐞 Feedback & contributions

Found a bug or want a feature? Open an issue or send a PR.

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ℹ️ More

See INPUT_SCHEMA.json for the full list of input parameters and defaults. For API usage, you can call the parsing functions directly from the code or adapt src/main.js as needed.