YouTube Search Scraper: videos, exact views, channels and rank

Type a search and get YouTube's results back as rows, in the order YouTube ranks them. Each row has the title, channel, exact view count, length, upload age and description snippet.

Sort and filter the way YouTube's own search does: by views, by upload date, or only videos from this week. You pay per video delivered.

What you get

Field	Example
searchQuery	how to make cold brew
rank	3
title	Everything I Learned About Cold Brew Coffee
channelName	James Hoffmann
viewCount	1060568
published	1y ago
duration / durationSeconds	26:50 / 1610
badges	2 products, 4K, Verified
url	Link to the video

Sample output

{
  "searchQuery": "how to make cold brew",
  "rank": 3,
  "videoId": "AB0QLjroFss",
  "title": "Everything I Learned About Cold Brew Coffee",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB0QLjroFss",
  "channelName": "James Hoffmann",
  "channelId": "UCMb0O2CdPBNi-QqPk5T3gsQ",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@jameshoffmann",
  "viewCount": 1060568,
  "views": "1,060,568 views",
  "published": "1y ago",
  "duration": "26:50",
  "durationSeconds": 1610,
  "badges": "2 products, 4K, Verified",
  "isLive": false
}

Quick start

1. Type what you'd search on YouTube into Search phrases. Add as many as you like.
2. Pick Sort by and Uploaded if you want them. The defaults match a normal YouTube search.
3. Set Max videos per search and click Start.

Use cases

• Find who ranks for your keywords and how many views the top 20 pull.
• Sort by upload date, filtered to this week, to watch new videos in a niche.
• Collect channel links from a search to build an outreach list.
• Pass the url column to our YouTube Transcript Scraper or YouTube Channel Videos Scraper.

How accurate is it?

We checked 8 results for "how to make cold brew" against each video's own page. Titles and channels matched on all 8. View counts were within 20 views (the page we checked a minute later had counted a few more), and lengths were within a second.

Search results only contain videos. Channels, playlists and Shorts shelves are skipped, so you don't pay for them.

YouTube's own upload-date filter leaks. Ask for "this week" and a few months-old videos still turn up. We drop any video clearly older than the window you picked, and you aren't charged for those. RUN_SUMMARY tells you how many were skipped.

What happens when something goes wrong

A search with no results returns 0 rows and isn't charged. RUN_SUMMARY lists how many videos each search returned.

Pricing

Pay per video delivered, plus Apify's small start fee per run. Set a maximum cost per run and the scraper stops at your limit.

FAQ

Does it need a YouTube API key? No.

How many results can one search return? Up to 500 here. YouTube itself tends to stop somewhere in the few hundreds, and stops sooner for narrow searches.

Will my results match what I see in my browser? Close, though not always identical. YouTube shuffles search results by location and history, and we search logged out from the US.

Something broke? Open an issue with the search phrase. I answer within a day.

Limitations

• published is YouTube's rounded age ("1y ago"). For an exact date, open the video.
• Shorts in their own shelf aren't included.

Export or use as an API

Download any run's results from the Storage tab as CSV, Excel, JSON or XML.

To call it from your own code, send your input to Apify's API and get the rows back in one request:

POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/leathered_latch~youtube-search-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN

It also plugs into Make, Zapier and n8n through Apify's integrations, and AI agents can find and run it through Apify's MCP server.

Your responsibility

How you use the output is your call, and so is the legal side of it. Copyright still covers any text or images you republish. The source site's own terms apply too. If you're unsure about a use, check with a lawyer first.

If you own content that shows up in these results and want it handled differently, open an issue on the Issues tab. We answer within 14 days.

Data source and credit

Every row comes from YouTube (Google LLC). We don't own this data, and we don't take credit for it. The search results belong to the creators of each video.

This tool reads only what YouTube shows to any logged-out visitor. No logins, no private data. Each row keeps a link back to the page it came from (the url field), so you can check any result and credit the source when you use it.

Not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by YouTube or Google. All names and trademarks belong to their owners.

Changelog

• 0.1 First release. Sort by relevance, views, date or rating; upload-date filter; up to 500 videos per search.
• 0.1.3 Upload-date filter now enforced (YouTube's lets older videos through). Retries when YouTube returns an empty results page.