YouTube Comments Scraper – Text, Author, Likes & Replies

Scrape comments from any YouTube video — text, author, likes, and reply count — by video URL or ID. Paste a video URL, a youtu.be link, a Shorts link, or just the 11-character video ID. This actor calls a licensed SERP data provider directly — no proxies, no headless browser, no YouTube rate limits or IP bans.

What data you get

Each result item is one comment:

• videoId, videoUrl — the video's ID and canonical youtube.com/watch?v= URL
• videoTitle — the video's title
• videoCommentsTotal — YouTube's displayed total comment count for the video (not how many this actor returned — see Limits)
• commentRank — the comment's position in the order YouTube/DataForSEO returned it, 1 being first
• author, authorUrl, authorThumbnail — the commenter's handle, channel URL, and avatar image URL
• text — the comment's text
• publishedAt — ISO 8601 UTC timestamp, derived from the relative age YouTube shows (see Limits: the date is reliable, the time of day is not)
• publishedAgo — YouTube's own human-readable relative time (e.g. "6 years ago", "3 days ago (edited)")
• likes — like count on the comment
• replyCount — number of replies to the comment (reply text itself is not returned — see Limits)
• scrapedAt — ISO 8601 UTC timestamp of when this actor fetched the comment

Why this scraper

• No bans, ever — this actor never touches youtube.com directly. It calls a licensed SERP data provider's comments API, so there's no IP to block and no CAPTCHA to solve.
• No browser, no proxies — no headless Chrome to keep patched, no residential proxy bill on top of the actor's own price.
• Per-comment pricing — you pay for comments actually returned, not per video or per run (see Pricing).
• Fast by default — mode: "auto" picks fast (live, a few seconds per video) for runs of 50 videos or fewer, and standard (queued, cheaper) for bigger batches — see Modes.
• Batch-friendly — up to 1,000 videos per run.
• No silent gaps — every video that doesn't produce comments (comments disabled, video not found, a stuck task) is listed in the FAILED_VIDEOS record with why, so a batch of 200 URLs never comes back as an unexplained 183 videos' worth of rows.

Use cases

• Social listening / audience research — pull what viewers are actually saying about a video, a product mention, or a competitor's content.
• Sentiment and topic analysis — feed text into an LLM or a classifier at scale across many videos.
• Community management prep — surface the most-liked or most-replied comments on your own videos without opening YouTube Studio one video at a time.

Pricing

This actor uses Apify's pay-per-event pricing, flat across all plans. You are charged for:

Event	What it means	Price
apify-actor-start	Apify's platform-billed "run started" event, charged once per run automatically — no code call needed	$0.00005
apify-default-dataset-item ("Comment" in Console)	Charged once per comment written to the output dataset	$0.0012

Videos with no comments are never charged — they don't produce any dataset rows at all, so you only pay for comments you actually get.

Worked example: scraping 1,000 comments costs 1,000 × $0.0012 + $0.00005 ≈ $1.20.

Apify's free plan includes monthly platform credit that, on its own, covers roughly the first ~4,000 comments with this actor before you'd need to add a payment method.

Modes

Mode	Upstream call	Wall-clock	Cap	When to use
auto (default)	fast for ≤50 videos, standard above that	See below	1,000 videos/run	Picks the right mode for the batch size automatically — no need to think about it for typical runs.
standard	Queued (task_post + polling)	~5 minutes per batch of up to 100 videos	1,000 videos/run	Cheapest upstream cost per comment; the right choice once auto would pick it anyway (>50 videos).
fast	Live (synchronous)	A few seconds per video	50 videos/run	Small batches where you need comments back immediately (interactive use, a quick one-off check). Capped at 50 videos per run so a bad input doesn't run up a live-mode bill.

Expected total wall-clock (with auto, or an explicit mode): 10 videos ≈ a few seconds (fast); 100 videos ≈ ~5 minutes (standard, one batch); 1,000 videos ≈ ~50 minutes (standard, 10 batches processed one after another).

Input

Minimal example:

{
  "videoUrls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
    "https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ"
  ],
  "maxCommentsPerVideo": 100
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
videoUrls	array of strings	(see prefill)	YouTube video URLs — watch, youtu.be, Shorts, or embed links — or bare 11-character video IDs. Max 1,000 per run, 50 when mode is explicitly set to "fast".
maxCommentsPerVideo	integer	20	How many comments to return per video, 20-200 (DataForSEO's hard ceiling — see Limits). Any value in that range is accepted; internally it's rounded up to the nearest multiple of 20 for the upstream request (DataForSEO bills per SERP of up to 20 comments), then the results are truncated back down to the number you asked for. Asking for 45 bills 3 upstream pages but returns exactly 45 rows.
mode	string	"auto"	"auto", "standard", or "fast" — see Modes.
language	string	"en"	Interface language code DataForSEO uses when fetching the page (e.g. "en", "es"). This does not filter which comments come back by language — YouTube returns whatever comments exist regardless of this setting.
country	string	"US"	ISO-2 country code setting the YouTube location context the request is made from (same effect as browsing YouTube from that country). Does not restrict which comments come back. One of a fixed, verified list of ~34 countries (see the Console dropdown).

Output

A real dataset item, captured from an actual run against "Me at the zoo" (jNQXAC9IVRw, YouTube's first-ever upload) in September 2026:

{
  "videoId": "jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "videoTitle": "Me at the zoo",
  "videoCommentsTotal": 10610900,
  "commentRank": 1,
  "author": "@SanDiegoZoo",
  "authorUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@SanDiegoZoo",
  "authorThumbnail": "https://yt3.ggpht.com/i8RqA9tYqbbnOi4mlnYEY7IR3kXAoDqQbM_5Sfzw7OjTubiGsOaTdlrIZmj-I0q0Vup68eqs=s88-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj",
  "text": "We're so honored that the first ever YouTube video was filmed here!",
  "publishedAt": "2020-09-08T17:48:01Z",
  "publishedAgo": "6 years ago",
  "likes": 4700000,
  "replyCount": 985,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-08T17:48:06Z"
}

Field	Type	Description
videoId	string	11-character YouTube video ID
videoUrl	string	Canonical https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<id> URL
videoTitle	string | null	Video title
videoCommentsTotal	integer	YouTube's displayed total comment count for the video — almost always far larger than what this actor returns (this row's video has 10.6M comments total; this actor returns at most 200 — see Limits)
commentRank	integer	Position in the order returned, 1 being first
author	string | null	Commenter's YouTube handle (includes the leading @)
authorUrl	string | null	Commenter's channel URL
authorThumbnail	string | null	Commenter's avatar image URL
text	string	The comment's text
publishedAt	string | null	ISO 8601 UTC, derived from the relative age (publishedAgo). The date is accurate to the day for recent comments and to the year for old ones; the time of day is not meaningful. null if it didn't parse
publishedAgo	string | null	YouTube's own human-readable relative time, exactly as displayed
likes	integer	Like count on the comment
replyCount	integer	Number of replies — the replies' text itself is not returned (see Limits)
scrapedAt	string	ISO 8601 UTC timestamp of when this actor fetched the comment

Limits

• 200 comments per video, maximum. DataForSEO's comments API caps depth (its pagination parameter) at 200 for both the live and standard queue. This actor never returns more than 200 comments for a single video, no matter how many total comments it has (the real row above is from a video with 10,610,900 comments — this actor would return at most 200 of them). This is the main trade-off against a browser-based scraper that can, in principle, paginate through every comment; it is also why this actor is fast and never gets blocked.
• Reply text is not returned, only replyCount. DataForSEO's comments endpoint reports how many replies a comment has but does not return the nested reply text itself.
• publishedAt is derived, not exact. YouTube shows comment age as text ("6 years ago", "2 days ago") and the data source converts that to a timestamp at scrape time. A comment shown as "2 days ago" gets a timestamp exactly 48 hours before the scrape, so the date is usable and the clock time is not. Use publishedAgo when you need the raw label; do not use publishedAt for minute-level time-series.
• Sort order is not configurable. Comments come back in whatever order YouTube/DataForSEO returns them; there is no "newest first" or "top comments" toggle.
• Videos with comments disabled, or that don't exist (deleted, private, region-locked), produce no dataset rows and are not charged. They're listed in the FAILED_VIDEOS key-value store record (videoId, videoUrl, status — no_comments, timed_out, or error — and a message), and counted in STATS under videosWithoutComments.
• standard mode (and auto above 50 videos): up to 1,000 videos per run, processed in batches of up to 100, polled for up to 15 minutes per batch. A batch still stuck after 15 minutes is skipped (counted in STATS as timedOut, and listed in FAILED_VIDEOS with that status) — this is rare and upstream-side.
• fast mode, whether picked by auto or set explicitly: capped at 50 videos per run (see Modes for why).

FAQ

Is this legal? The actor retrieves publicly available comment data through a licensed SERP data provider, the same category of data source used by SEO and content-research tools. You are responsible for how you use the extracted text under your local regulations and YouTube's own terms of service.

How is this different from other YouTube comment scrapers on Apify? Most comment scrapers drive a browser or an unofficial YouTube endpoint directly, which means occasional blocks and rate limits, but can in principle pull every comment on a video. This actor calls a licensed SERP data API instead: no proxies, no browser, no bans — at the cost of a 200-comments-per-video ceiling (see Limits). If you need every comment on a handful of videos and don't mind the ban risk, a browser-based scraper may suit you better; if you need reliable, unblockable comment data across hundreds of videos, this actor is the better fit.

Can I get the replies to a comment? Not the reply text — only replyCount, the number of replies. DataForSEO's comments API doesn't return nested reply content.

Do I get charged for videos with no comments? No. A video with comments disabled, deleted, or otherwise producing no comments generates no dataset rows, so apify-default-dataset-item is never charged for it. Check the FAILED_VIDEOS record (alongside STATS.videosWithoutComments) to see exactly which videos didn't come back and why.

Why is videoCommentsTotal so much bigger than the number of rows I got? videoCommentsTotal is YouTube's own displayed total comment count for the video — it's informational context, not a promise of how many this actor returns. This actor is capped at 200 comments per video regardless of how many the video actually has (see Limits).