Stack Overflow Questions Scraper

Free plan limit: Free-plan users can receive up to 5 result records per run. Paid-plan and local/unknown runs retain the Actor's existing limits.

Extract public Stack Overflow questions by search text, tags, or exact question URLs. The Actor returns analysis-ready records with titles, tags, scores, views, answer counts, author metadata, dates, links, and optional question bodies.

This Actor is useful for developer research, documentation gap analysis, technical-content planning, trend discovery, support intelligence, and building question datasets. It is not a tool for private content, user authentication, answers/comments extraction, voting, posting, or bypassing Stack Overflow access controls.

What it extracts

Field	Description
questionId, url, title	Stable ID, canonical question link, and decoded title
tags	Stack Overflow tags assigned to the question
score, viewCount, answerCount	Engagement and response metrics at extraction time
isAnswered, acceptedAnswerId	Answer state and accepted answer reference
authorName, authorId, authorReputation	Public author metadata when available
creationDate, lastActivityDate, lastEditDate	UTC ISO 8601 timestamps
closedDate, closedReason	Closure metadata when applicable
contentLicense	License reported by Stack Exchange
bodyHtml, bodyText	Optional question body in HTML and normalized text
source, scrapedAt	Provenance and extraction timestamp

Deleted users and absent accepted answers are represented as null, not invented values. The default dataset contains only question records; run diagnostics are written separately to the OUTPUT key-value-store record.

Input

Input	Type	Default	Purpose
searchQuery	string	typescript	Free-text question search
tags	string[]	[]	Require up to five tags
startUrls	request list	[]	Fetch exact Stack Overflow question URLs
sort	enum	relevance	relevance, activity, creation, or votes
minScore	integer	omitted	Minimum score; unavailable for relevance sort
fromDate, toDate	YYYY-MM-DD	omitted	Inclusive creation-date bounds in UTC
includeBody	boolean	false	Include question body HTML and plain text
maxResults	integer	25	Cap output and billable records from 1 to 500

Search by text:

{
  "searchQuery": "typescript generics",
  "tags": ["typescript"],
  "sort": "relevance",
  "includeBody": true,
  "maxResults": 25
}

Browse recent tagged questions:

{
  "searchQuery": "",
  "tags": ["javascript", "reactjs"],
  "sort": "creation",
  "fromDate": "2026-01-01",
  "maxResults": 100
}

Fetch exact questions:

{
  "searchQuery": "",
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37233735/interfaces-vs-types-in-typescript" }
  ],
  "sort": "activity",
  "maxResults": 1
}

Run through the Apify API:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/USERNAME~stack-overflow-questions-scraper/runs?token=APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"searchQuery":"python async await","tags":["python"],"maxResults":10}'

Replace USERNAME and APIFY_TOKEN with your own Apify account values. Keep tokens in secrets or authorization headers in production.

Output example

{
  "questionId": 37233735,
  "title": "Interfaces vs Types in TypeScript",
  "url": "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37233735/interfaces-vs-types-in-typescript",
  "tags": ["typescript", "interface", "typescript-types"],
  "score": 2807,
  "viewCount": 1135806,
  "answerCount": 25,
  "isAnswered": true,
  "acceptedAnswerId": 37233777,
  "authorName": "user6101582",
  "authorId": null,
  "authorReputation": null,
  "creationDate": "2016-05-15T01:53:52.000Z",
  "lastActivityDate": "2026-07-27T10:44:10.000Z",
  "lastEditDate": null,
  "closedDate": null,
  "closedReason": null,
  "contentLicense": "CC BY-SA 4.0",
  "bodyHtml": null,
  "bodyText": null,
  "source": "Stack Exchange API v2.3",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-29T00:00:00.000Z"
}

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing. These are the current Apify Store event prices:

Event	Price (USD)	When it is charged
apify-default-dataset-item	FREE: $0.02; BRONZE: $0.02; SILVER: $0.02; GOLD: $0.016; PLATINUM: $0.016; DIAMOND: $0.016	Stack Overflow question — One schema-valid Stack Overflow question written to the default dataset.
apify-actor-start	$0.005	Actor Start — Charged when the Actor starts running. Number of events charged depends on Actor memory (one event per GB, minimum one event). — Charged once per run.

Apify platform usage for this Actor run is included alongside the event prices above; no separate per-run platform-usage fee is passed to users.

This covers Apify platform usage for this Actor run. Other Apify products or usage outside this Actor run may still follow your account plan.

Reliability and limitations

Direct Stack Overflow HTML access is protected by Cloudflare in common cloud environments. After measuring that path, this Actor uses Stack Exchange's official public API v2.3 as the authorized first-party fallback. It does not solve CAPTCHAs or use private sessions.

The Actor follows API backoff instructions, retries temporary failures with bounded exponential delay, paginates up to the requested result cap, deduplicates question IDs, and reports remaining API quota in OUTPUT. The unauthenticated Stack Exchange API quota is shared by IP and can change; quota exhaustion or upstream downtime produces an explicit failed/partial diagnostic instead of fabricated data. Identical queries should not be run more than once per minute because Stack Exchange heavily caches API methods.

Search relevance follows Stack Exchange's undocumented relevance algorithm. Tags in text-search mode follow the API's advanced-search behavior; tag-only browse mode uses the /questions endpoint. This Actor extracts questions only—not answers, comments, revisions, or full user profiles.

Responsible use

Use the data in line with Stack Overflow's Terms of Service, the Stack Exchange API terms, applicable privacy law, and each record's reported content license. Attribute Stack Overflow and the original authors when republishing licensed content. Avoid collecting or using public author data for harassment, spam, sensitive profiling, or decisions that materially affect people.

For support, include the run ID, redacted input, expected result, and observed OUTPUT summary. Never share Apify tokens or other secrets.