YouTube Scraper – Videos, Channels, Comments & Transcripts

Turn YouTube searches, videos, Shorts, channels and playlists into clean, ready-to-use data. YouTube Scraper collects video metadata, channel profiles, comments, replies and full timestamped transcripts—without a YouTube API key and without browser-level costs.

Use it for market research, creator discovery, content intelligence, audience analysis, lead generation, AI datasets, brand monitoring and competitive research. Paste URLs, enter keywords, choose your limits, and click Start.

What can this YouTube scraper collect?

• Keyword search: videos, Shorts, channels, playlists and movies
• Search filters: upload date, duration, relevance, popularity, HD, 4K, subtitles, live, Creative Commons, HDR, 360° and more
• Single videos, Shorts and live videos: title, full description, views, likes, duration, category, keywords, thumbnails, channel details and status flags
• Channels: profile, description, handle, avatar, subscribers, video count, keywords and available countries
• Channel listings: videos, Shorts, live streams and playlists with pagination
• Playlists: playlist details and every available video
• Comments: top or newest comments, likes, authors, badges, pinned status and creator hearts
• Replies: reply threads with configurable limits
• Transcripts: complete text plus timestamped segments and language information
• Related videos: YouTube recommendations for each video
• Video downloads: optionally save selected videos as MP4 files in 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p or the best available quality

Why choose this Actor?

• Fast and affordable: lightweight HTTP requests instead of a full browser
• Reliable cloud runs: connection handling is fully automatic
• Fast at scale: optimized parallel processing is included automatically
• No-code friendly: one form handles every supported YouTube URL
• No YouTube Data API key: start immediately without quotas or Google Cloud setup
• Flexible at any size: scrape one video or paginate through large channels and playlists
• Automation ready: export JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or connect with Make, Zapier, Google Sheets and your own API
• AI ready: structured metadata and transcripts are ideal for RAG, LLM analysis, summaries and content research

Quick start

1. Add YouTube URLs and/or search keywords.
2. Choose search filters and channel content types.
3. Turn on transcripts, comments, replies or related videos only when needed. To save video files too, enable Download YouTube videos, choose a quality, and set a maximum download count.
4. Set a clear maximum for videos and comments.
5. Click Start and export the dataset in your preferred format.

Example input: search videos with transcripts

{
  "searchQueries": ["AI automation tutorial", "Apify web scraping"],
  "searchType": "video",
  "uploadDate": "month",
  "duration": "three_to_twenty_mins",
  "sortBy": "relevance",
  "maxResults": 50,
  "scrapeVideoDetails": true,
  "includeTranscripts": true,
  "transcriptLanguage": "en",
  "maxCommentsPerVideo": 0,
  "language": "en",
  "location": "US"
}

Example input: channel videos, Shorts and comments

{
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.youtube.com/@ApifyTech" }],
  "channelContentTypes": ["videos", "shorts"],
  "maxVideosPerChannel": 200,
  "scrapeVideoDetails": true,
  "maxCommentsPerVideo": 100,
  "commentSort": "newest",
  "includeReplies": true,
  "maxRepliesPerComment": 20
}

Example video output

{
  "recordType": "video",
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "Video title",
  "description": "Full video description...",
  "channelId": "UC...",
  "channelName": "Channel name",
  "durationSeconds": 213,
  "viewCount": 1600000000,
  "likeCount": 18000000,
  "category": "Music",
  "keywords": ["music", "official video"],
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/.../maxresdefault.jpg",
  "captionLanguages": [{ "code": "en", "name": "English", "autoGenerated": false }],
  "transcript": {
    "languageCode": "en",
    "text": "Complete transcript text...",
    "segments": [{ "startSeconds": 0, "durationSeconds": 2.4, "text": "First caption" }]
  }
}

Example comment output

{
  "recordType": "comment",
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "commentId": "Ugx...",
  "parentCommentId": null,
  "text": "Comment text",
  "authorName": "Viewer name",
  "authorChannelId": "UC...",
  "likeCount": 125,
  "replyCount": 8,
  "publishedText": "2 days ago",
  "isPinned": false,
  "isHearted": true
}

Popular use cases

YouTube market and competitor research

Find the most visible videos for a topic, compare channel output, track engagement signals and uncover content gaps competitors have missed.

Creator and influencer discovery

Search by niche, collect channel and video performance signals, and build targeted creator lists for partnerships or outreach.

Comments and audience sentiment analysis

Collect top or recent comments and replies for sentiment analysis, recurring questions, product feedback, pain points and customer language.

YouTube transcript scraping for AI

Build searchable knowledge bases, summarize videos, extract quotes and topics, create embeddings, or supply timestamped source material to an AI workflow.

Content ideation and SEO research

Discover titles, keywords, descriptions, popular formats and recent trends around a search phrase. Export the data and turn evidence into a stronger editorial calendar.

Brand monitoring

Search brand and product keywords, monitor relevant uploads, analyze descriptions and comments, and route findings into dashboards or alerts.

Understanding limits and cost

The defaults favor predictable, economical runs. A listing-only run is fastest. Full metadata adds a lightweight request for each video; transcripts, related videos and comments add more requests. Start with a small limit, verify the output, then scale up.

Video downloading is disabled by default because MP4 files can significantly increase memory, run time and storage usage. The default download limit is one video at 360p. Downloaded files appear in the run's key-value store and each matching video record includes its file name, size, delivered quality and download URL. When YouTube does not offer the requested quality as a combined audio-and-video MP4, the Actor safely falls back to 360p. Only download content you have the right to save.

Set Maximum comments per video to 0 when comments are not needed. YouTube may disable comments or captions on individual videos, and private, removed, age-restricted or region-restricted content may return limited data.

Output and integrations

Every item includes a recordType such as video, channel, playlist or comment. This makes mixed runs easy to filter. Download results as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or RSS, access them through the Apify API, or send them to your favorite automation and analytics tools.

Responsible use

Use this Actor only for lawful purposes and follow YouTube’s terms, privacy rules and applicable data-protection laws. Avoid collecting or using personal data in ways people would not reasonably expect. The Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube or Google.

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