YouTube Search Transcripts: Keyword to Video Transcripts

What does YouTube Search Transcripts do?

YouTube Search Transcripts searches YouTube for any keyword or phrase and returns the transcripts of the top videos, in YouTube's order (searchRank), as plain text, timestamped segments, SRT, Markdown or RAG-ready chunks, with title, channel, duration and views. Filter by upload date (last hour to last year), length (under 4, 4-20 or over 20 minutes) and sort order (relevance, date, views, rating). No YouTube API key.

Schedule a search sorted by date with Only new videos and it becomes an alert: each run returns only the videos about your topic that earlier runs did not deliver.

It runs on the Apify platform, so you also get an API, scheduling, integrations (Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, n8n, Slack) and access for AI agents through the Apify MCP server.

Independent tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube or Google LLC. It only reads publicly available captions.

Why use it?

• 🔎 Topic research: what the top videos about a subject actually say, without watching them.
• 📈 Brand and market monitoring: new videos that mention your brand, product or competitor, every day.
• 🤖 LLM and RAG datasets: long, in-depth videos on a topic, already chunked with timestamps.
• 🧠 Content ideas: compare how the best-ranked videos explain a topic.

How to get transcripts of YouTube search results

1. Click Try for free.
2. In YouTube searches, enter one search per line, for example how to use claude code.
3. Set Max videos per search (up to 500, 20 per results page) and the optional filters.
4. Click Start and download the results as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Input

{
  "searchQueries": ["how to use claude code"],
  "maxVideosPerSearch": 10,
  "sortBy": "relevance",
  "uploadDate": "any",
  "videoDuration": "any",
  "outputs": ["text"]
}

Daily alert: "sortBy": "date", "uploadDate": "today", "onlyNewVideos": true, and a schedule.

Output

Real result from a run on 2026-10-13 (text shortened):

{
  "videoId": "eMZmDH3T2bY",
  "title": "Claude Code Tutorial for Beginners",
  "channel": "Kevin Stratvert",
  "searchQuery": "how to use claude code",
  "searchRank": 3,
  "language": "en",
  "durationSeconds": 883,
  "viewCount": 945496,
  "text": "I don't write code by hand anymore. I just ask Claude. And in this video, I've partnered with Anthropic to break down three things that I wish I knew about Vibe Engineering before I started...",
  "wordCount": 2793
}

Field	Description
searchQuery, searchRank	The search and the video's position in the results (1 = first)
text, segments, srt, vtt, markdown, chunks	The transcript in the formats you choose
title, channel, durationSeconds, viewCount, keywords, description	Video details
status	ok (billed), no-captions, unavailable or error (not billed)

How much does it cost?

Event	Price
Run start (per GB of memory, default 256 MB)	$0.001
Transcript (one video, all formats, with video details)	$0.003
AI transcription minute (only with aiFallback, videos without captions)	$0.010

100 transcripts cost $0.30, residential proxies included. Searching is free: you pay only for transcripts returned. Videos without captions, private or removed videos and failures are never billed. Set Max cost per run and the Actor stops cleanly at that limit.

Use it with AI agents (MCP)

Add https://mcp.apify.com?tools=fguiraud/youtube-search-transcripts to Claude, Cursor or any MCP client and ask "Find the top 10 YouTube videos about RAG evaluation and summarize what they recommend." Common field names (query, keywords, search...) are accepted.

FAQ and limitations

• Are the results the same as in my browser? They follow YouTube's order for a signed-out visitor in the US, so they can differ slightly from a signed-in search.
• Only regular videos are returned: channels, playlists, Shorts shelves and ads are left out.
• Videos without captions: they come back with status: "no-captions" and are not billed, unless you turn on aiFallback to transcribe them with AI (open-source Whisper, $0.010 per minute).
• Age-restricted, private and members-only videos cannot be read without signing in; they come back as unavailable and are not billed.
• Is it legal? The Actor reads the captions YouTube shows publicly on each video. Respect the rights of the video creators when you reuse their content.
• Found a problem or need a feature? Open an issue on the Issues tab.
• Did it save you time? A short review on the Reviews tab helps other people find this Actor.

Related tools

• Whole channels or playlists: YouTube Channel Transcripts.
• Single videos or many links: YouTube Transcript Scraper.