🎯 YouTube Comments Scraper — Extract Comments & Replies, No API Key

What does YouTube Comments Scraper do?

YouTube Comments Scraper extracts structured comment data from any public YouTube video — including replies, author details, like counts, pinned status, and creator hearts — without requiring a YouTube Data API key or any login. Feed it a list of video URLs or bare video IDs and it returns a clean, AI-ready JSON dataset.

Why use YouTube Comments Scraper?

• No API key needed — unlike the official YouTube Data API (which has strict daily quotas of 10,000 units), this actor uses YouTube's internal InnerTube API via a real browser session, giving you unlimited access
• Replies included — most basic scrapers only capture top-level comments; this actor optionally digs into reply threads too
• Video metadata included — every comment record includes the video title and URL, so multi-video datasets stay organized
• MCP and AI-agent ready — clean field names, consistent output schema, and no junk fields means Claude, ChatGPT, and other LLM tools can use this data directly

What data can YouTube Comments Scraper extract?

Field	Type	Description	Example
video_id	string	YouTube video ID	dQw4w9WgXcQ
video_title	string	Title of the video	"Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up"
video_url	string	Full video URL	https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
comment_id	string	Unique comment ID	UgxK8eTB1234abcde
comment_text	string	Full comment text	"This is a timeless classic!"
author_name	string	Commenter's display name	John Doe
author_channel_url	string	Link to commenter's channel	https://youtube.com/@johndoe
author_channel_id	string	Internal YouTube channel ID	UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw
like_count	integer	Number of likes on the comment	142
reply_count	integer	Number of replies (top-level only)	5
is_reply	boolean	True if this is a reply comment	false
parent_comment_id	string	ID of the parent comment (replies only)	null
published_at	string	Relative time posted (as shown by YouTube)	"3 months ago"
is_pinned	boolean	True if pinned by the creator	false
is_hearted	boolean	True if the creator gave it a heart	true
scraped_at	string	ISO 8601 timestamp of scrape	2026-04-09T12:00:00.000Z
source_url	string	The exact URL scraped	https://youtube.com/watch?v=...

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How to Scrape YouTube Comments

Step 1 — Add video URLs or IDs

In the YouTube Video URLs field, paste one or more YouTube links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
https://youtu.be/9bZkp7q19f0
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/abc123def45

Alternatively, use the Video IDs field to paste bare 11-character IDs, one per line:

dQw4w9WgXcQ
9bZkp7q19f0

You can use both fields simultaneously and the actor will deduplicate automatically.

Step 2 — Configure limits

Set Max Comments per Video to control how many comments to collect per video. The default is 100. For large comment sections, set it higher (up to 10,000). Each comment costs $0.002.

Step 3 — Enable replies (optional)

Toggle Include Replies to also collect reply threads under top-level comments. Replies count toward the maxComments limit and are each charged at the same rate.

Step 4 — Run and export

Click Start and the actor will run. When finished, your dataset is available to download as JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML. You can also access it via the Apify API.

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Use Cases

Sentiment analysis and brand monitoring — scrape comments from your brand's videos or competitors' videos to understand audience sentiment. Feed the comment_text field directly into an LLM for classification.

Content research — analyze what viewers are asking, praising, or complaining about on tutorial and product-review videos. Find FAQ topics your own content should address.

AI training datasets — build large corpora of human-written YouTube comments for fine-tuning language models, training toxicity classifiers, or creating synthetic conversation datasets.

Influencer analysis — assess engagement quality on creator channels by analyzing comment-to-like ratios, creator heart frequency, and reply activity patterns.

Academic research — scrape public comment sections for social media research, political discourse analysis, or online community studies.

Competitor monitoring — collect comments from competitor product videos to understand pain points and feature requests you can act on.

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Pricing

This actor uses Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for what you actually scrape.

Event	Cost
Actor start	$0.00005 per GB of memory
Scraped comment	$0.002 per comment

Cost examples

Comments	Cost
100 comments	$0.20
500 comments	$1.00
1,000 comments	$2.00
5,000 comments	$10.00

You can cap spending using Apify's built-in Max total charge setting in the actor's run configuration.

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Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
startUrls	URL list	—	YouTube video URLs to scrape
videoIds	String list	—	Bare video IDs (11-char strings)
maxComments	Integer	100	Max comments per video (1–10,000)
includeReplies	Boolean	false	Also scrape reply threads

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Output Format

Each record in the output dataset corresponds to one comment (or reply). Here is a sample output record:

{
  "video_id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "video_title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Music Video)",
  "video_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "comment_id": "UgxK8eTB9abc1234defg",
  "comment_text": "This song genuinely never gets old. It's been 35+ years and it still slaps.",
  "author_name": "Jane Smith",
  "author_channel_url": "https://www.youtube.com/@janesmith",
  "author_channel_id": "UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw",
  "like_count": 142,
  "reply_count": 5,
  "is_reply": false,
  "parent_comment_id": null,
  "published_at": "3 months ago",
  "is_pinned": false,
  "is_hearted": true,
  "scraped_at": "2026-04-09T12:00:00.000Z",
  "source_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
}

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Running via the Apify API

You can trigger this actor programmatically using the Apify JavaScript client:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_API_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('USERNAME/youtube-comments-scraper').call({
  startUrls: [{ url: 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ' }],
  maxComments: 500,
  includeReplies: true,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Or with curl:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/USERNAME~youtube-comments-scraper/runs?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "startUrls": [{"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"}],
    "maxComments": 200,
    "includeReplies": false
  }'

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Technical Details

This actor uses PlaywrightCrawler (a real Chromium browser) to open YouTube video pages and then issues API calls to YouTube's internal InnerTube endpoint (/youtubei/v1/next) from within the browser context. This approach:

• Uses the browser's existing cookies and session tokens, so no API key is needed
• Avoids bot detection because requests originate from a real browser
• Handles comment pagination automatically by following continuation tokens
• Gracefully handles videos with disabled comments

No login is required. YouTube comments are publicly visible and this actor only accesses publicly available data.

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FAQ

Q: Do I need a YouTube API key? No. This actor does not use the YouTube Data API. It uses YouTube's internal InnerTube API via a real browser session, which requires no API key and has no quota limits.

Q: Can it scrape comments from private videos? No. Only publicly accessible video comments can be scraped.

Q: Why are some videos returning 0 comments? Some video creators disable comments entirely. When this happens, the actor logs a warning and moves on to the next video.

Q: How accurate are the published_at timestamps? YouTube returns relative timestamps (e.g. "3 months ago"), not absolute dates. This is a YouTube limitation — the platform does not expose the exact comment date to unauthenticated users in all cases.

Q: Is reply scraping slower? Yes — fetching replies requires an additional API call per top-level comment that has replies. For large comment sections with many replies, expect longer run times.

Q: Can I scrape YouTube Shorts comments? Yes — Shorts URLs (e.g. youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID) are fully supported.

Q: What if I hit the charge limit mid-run? The actor will stop cleanly and save all comments scraped up to that point. You will not be charged beyond the limit you set.

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Works Great With

• YouTube Scraper (streamers/youtube-scraper) — extract video metadata (views, likes, subscriber counts) and pair it with comments from this actor for full video analytics
• AI Text Classifier — feed comment_text fields into an LLM for automated sentiment analysis or topic classification

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Legal Disclaimer

This actor is designed for lawful extraction of publicly available data from YouTube. Users are solely responsible for ensuring their use complies with YouTube's Terms of Service, applicable copyright laws, data protection regulations (including GDPR and CCPA), and any other relevant laws in their jurisdiction. Do not use this actor to collect personally identifiable information in violation of privacy laws. Scraping for unauthorized commercial purposes or to circumvent access controls is prohibited.