Telegram Channel Scraper — No API, No Login

Scrape posts from any public Telegram channel in seconds. No Telegram API keys, no phone number, no account, no MTProto setup — this Actor reads the official public web preview (t.me/s/...), so you just paste channel names and get clean, structured JSON back.

What does it do?

Give it one or more public channels and it collects the latest posts (newest first) with:

• ✅ Full post text and direct post URL
• ✅ Publication date (ISO 8601) and view count (parsed to a number: 1.68M → 1680000)
• ✅ Forwarded-from attribution (channel name + link)
• ✅ Media flags: photo URLs, video presence + thumbnail, document names, poll questions
• ✅ Link previews (URL, title, description) and all outbound links in the text
• ✅ Built-in keyword filter (case-insensitive) — pay only for posts that match
• ✅ Date limit (postedAfter) — the crawl stops paginating at older posts, keeping runs fast and cheap

Use cases

• Brand & topic monitoring — track mentions of your product, competitors, or keywords across news and community channels.
• Crypto / financial signals — collect posts from trading and announcement channels into a dataset your pipeline (or AI agent) can consume.
• OSINT & research — archive public channels with dates, views, and forward provenance.
• News aggregation — turn Telegram channels into a structured feed for your app, dashboard, or newsletter.
• AI agents (MCP) — this Actor works out of the box as an MCP tool via the Apify MCP server, so LLM agents can query Telegram channels on demand.

Input

Field	Type	Description
channels	array	Usernames or URLs: durov, @durov, https://t.me/durov
maxPostsPerChannel	integer	Max posts per channel, newest first (default 100)
keywords	array	Keep only posts containing at least one keyword (optional)
postedAfter	date	Keep only posts on/after this date; stops pagination early (optional)
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy settings (optional)

Output example

{
    "channel": "telegram",
    "id": 431,
    "url": "https://t.me/telegram/431",
    "date": "2026-03-02T17:33:52+00:00",
    "text": "Telegram now supports...",
    "views": 1680000,
    "forwardedFrom": null,
    "media": {
        "photos": ["https://cdn4.telesco.pe/file/..."],
        "hasVideo": false,
        "videoThumb": null,
        "document": null,
        "poll": null
    },
    "linkPreview": {
        "url": "https://telegram.org/blog/...",
        "title": "Telegram Blog",
        "description": "..."
    },
    "links": ["https://telegram.org/blog/..."],
    "scrapedAt": "2026-07-10T15:04:05.000Z"
}

Limitations (please read)

• Only public channels with a web preview work. Private channels, private groups, and channels whose owners disabled the preview cannot be scraped — the Actor logs a clear warning for those.
• The web preview does not expose comments/replies or subscriber-only content.
• Reactions are not included in the public preview markup.

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing: you are charged a small fee per scraped post that is actually delivered to your dataset. Posts filtered out by your keywords or date limit are not charged. Set a maximum budget on any run with the standard Apify charge limit.

Support

Found a bug or need a field that is missing? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab — issues are typically answered within 24 hours.