Stack Overflow & Stack Exchange Scraper — Questions by Tag or Search, Clean JSON

Scrape questions from Stack Overflow and any Stack Exchange site by tag or full-text search, and get back clean, structured JSON — title, tags, score, views, answer count, accepted-answer flag, author, dates, link and the full question body. It runs on the official Stack Exchange API v2.3, with automatic pagination so large tag or search result sets come back in one run. No key required; add an optional Stack Apps key to raise the daily quota. Built for developer researchers, community analysts and knowledge-base builders.

Features

• 🌐 Any Stack Exchange site — site targets stackoverflow, serverfault, superuser, askubuntu, math, stats, unix and more.
• 🏷️ Tag or search — filter by tags, run a full-text query, or combine both.
• 🔀 Smart sorting — sortBy supports votes, activity, creation, hot (tag mode) or relevance (search mode).
• 📈 Quality filter — minScore keeps only questions above a score threshold.
• 📄 Full question body — the body field carries the cleaned-up question text, HTML stripped and entities decoded.
• 🔑 Optional API key — supply a Stack Apps key to lift the quota from 300 to 10,000 requests/day.
• ⚡ Deep pagination — pages through large result sets up to maxItems automatically.

What you get

Every question becomes one clean JSON record:

{
  "questionId": 12345678,
  "title": "How do I merge two dictionaries in Python?",
  "tags": ["python", "dictionary", "merge"],
  "score": 4820,
  "viewCount": 3100000,
  "answerCount": 27,
  "isAnswered": true,
  "acceptedAnswerId": 12345699,
  "ownerName": "devuser",
  "ownerReputation": 15230,
  "ownerLink": "https://stackoverflow.com/users/1/devuser",
  "creationDate": "2016-09-02T10:12:00.000Z",
  "lastActivityDate": "2026-05-14T08:41:00.000Z",
  "link": "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345678/how-do-i-merge-two-dictionaries",
  "body": "I have two Python dictionaries and I want to combine them into one..."
}

Output schema

Field	Type	Description
questionId	integer	Unique Stack Exchange question ID.
title	string	Question title.
tags	array	Tags applied to the question.
score	integer	Net vote score of the question.
viewCount	integer	Number of times the question was viewed.
answerCount	integer	Number of answers on the question.
isAnswered	boolean	Whether the question is marked answered.
acceptedAnswerId	integer	ID of the accepted answer, if any.
ownerName	string	Display name of the question's author.
ownerReputation	integer	Reputation score of the author.
ownerLink	string (URL)	Link to the author's profile.
creationDate	string (ISO date)	When the question was created.
lastActivityDate	string (ISO date)	When the question last had activity.
link	string (URL)	Link to the question.
body	string	Cleaned-up question text (HTML stripped).

Input

{
  "site": "stackoverflow",
  "tags": ["python"],
  "query": "",
  "sortBy": "votes",
  "minScore": 50,
  "maxItems": 500
}

Field	Description
site	Stack Exchange site (e.g. stackoverflow, serverfault, superuser, askubuntu, math, stats, unix).
tags	Filter by tags (e.g. python, javascript). One per line. Combine with a query or use alone.
query	Full-text search over questions. Leave empty to list by tag.
sortBy	votes, activity, creation, hot (tag mode) or relevance (search mode).
minScore	Only questions with at least this score.
maxItems	Max questions to return.
apiKey	Optional Stack Apps key to raise the daily quota from 300 to 10,000 requests.

Use cases

• Mine the highest-voted questions for a tag to find common problems and gaps.
• Track new or trending questions on a niche Stack Exchange site.
• Build a developer knowledge base or FAQ dataset from accepted-answer questions.
• Analyze community activity by score, views and answer counts over time.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: you're billed a small amount per run and per item scraped — you only pay for what you get. See the Pricing tab for current rates.

FAQ

Do I need a Stack Exchange account or API key? No. The actor runs on the official Stack Exchange API v2.3 with no key. An optional Stack Apps key is only needed to raise the daily quota from 300 to 10,000 requests.

How many questions can I scrape per run? As many as you set with maxItems. The actor walks the API's has_more pages automatically with rate-limit backoff until it hits your limit.

Which sites can I scrape besides Stack Overflow? Any Stack Exchange site — set site to stackoverflow, serverfault, superuser, askubuntu, math, stats, unix and many more.

What's the output format? Structured JSON — one record per question with title, tags, score, viewCount, answerCount, isAnswered, acceptedAnswerId, author, dates, link and the full cleaned-up body. Export as JSON, CSV, Excel or via the API.

Can I filter by tag, score or search term? Yes. Filter by tags, run a full-text query, or combine both; keep only high-quality items with minScore; and order results with sortBy (votes, activity, creation, hot, or relevance in search mode).

Can I integrate this with other tools? The Stack Exchange Scraper can be connected with almost any cloud service or web app thanks to integrations on the Apify platform. It works with Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub, Google Drive and many more, plus the Apify API, JavaScript/Python clients and MCP. Or use webhooks to trigger an action whenever a run finishes.

Related Actors

Building a developer knowledge base or research dataset? Combine this with our other developer-data scrapers:

• Hacker News Scraper — stories, comments and Ask/Show HN by keyword and filters.
• GitHub Scraper — repositories and user profiles with stars, topics, licenses and leads.
• Wikipedia Scraper — full article text, summaries and pageviews in any language.
• npm Package Scraper — search and look up npm packages with metadata, dependencies and downloads.

Notes

This Actor uses the official public Stack Exchange API (v2.3). It is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Stack Exchange Inc.; "Stack Overflow" and "Stack Exchange" are trademarks of Stack Exchange Inc.