Yandex Zen Scraper

What does Yandex Zen Scraper do?

Yandex Zen Scraper extracts public stats from Yandex Zen / Dzen publications without an API key or login. Paste a list of links (articles or videos) and it returns clean, structured data for every one — built for bulk runs.

Yandex Zen Scraper can extract:

• View counts
• Likes
• Comment counts
• Engagement rate (calculated)
• Author / channel name, ID, profile URL and subscriber count
• Title, category and publish date

It works for articles (/a/…), posts (/b/…), videos (/video/watch/…) and shorts (/shorts/…).

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How does it work?

Unlike many sites, Dzen publication pages are gated behind Yandex sign-in for plain HTTP requests. Dzen Scraper therefore uses a real headless browser (Playwright) to render each page anonymously — exactly like a normal reader — and reads the stats from the rendered page. No Yandex account is needed.

Because Yandex aggressively blocks datacenter IPs with SmartCaptcha, the scraper uses Apify Residential Proxy (country RU) by default.

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How to use it

1. Click Start
2. Paste your Dzen links into the Yandex Zen URLs field — one per line, or a whole blob separated by spaces/commas/new lines (they are split automatically). You can also upload a file or link a Google Sheet via the second field.
3. Click Run
4. When the run finishes, preview or download your data from the Output tab (JSON, CSV, Excel)

Supported URL formats (query strings ?… and anchors #… are ignored):

• https://dzen.ru/a/<id> — articles
• https://dzen.ru/b/<id> — posts (short text publications)
• https://dzen.ru/video/watch/<id> — videos
• https://dzen.ru/shorts/<id> — shorts

Duplicate URLs are removed automatically, so bulk lists with repeats are fine.

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Input parameters

Parameter	Type	Description	Default
urls	array	Dzen URLs, bulk paste (one per line or a separated blob)	—
startUrls	array	Alternative bulk input: list / file / Google Sheet	—
maxItems	integer	Max publications per run (1–5000)	1000
maxConcurrency	integer	Parallel browser pages (keep 1–3)	2
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy settings	Residential RU

Proxy note. Yandex blocks datacenter IPs quickly, so Residential proxy (RU) is enabled by default. You can turn it off, but expect SmartCaptcha on anything beyond a few requests.

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Results

One JSON object is returned per input URL.

Example output:

[
  {
    "inputUrl": "https://dzen.ru/a/afRiHXixAFfUTmXO",
    "platform": "dzen",
    "contentId": "afRiHXixAFfUTmXO",
    "contentType": "article",
    "contentUrl": "https://dzen.ru/a/afRiHXixAFfUTmXO",
    "title": "Овощи, которые стоит сажать рядом друг с другом 🍅🌿",
    "author": "Садовый клуб. Вероника Поливкина",
    "authorId": "5ddebbefc429860a2f8e4c3c",
    "authorUrl": "https://dzen.ru/id/5ddebbefc429860a2f8e4c3c",
    "authorSubscribers": 86128,
    "views": 16158,
    "likes": 263,
    "dislikes": null,
    "comments": 3,
    "reposts": null,
    "favorites": null,
    "engagementRate": 1.65,
    "category": "Садоводство",
    "publishedAt": "2026-05-06T05:30:37.272Z",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-14T12:08:19.363Z",
    "status": "success",
    "error": null
  }
]

Field description

Field	Description
inputUrl	Original Dzen URL provided as input
platform	Always "dzen"
contentId	Dzen publication id
contentType	article, post, video or short
contentUrl	Canonical publication URL
title	Publication title
author	Channel / author name
authorId	Channel id
authorUrl	Link to the channel
authorSubscribers	Channel subscriber count (see caveat below)
views	View count
likes	Like count
dislikes	Not exposed publicly by Dzen → always null
comments	Comment count
reposts	Not exposed publicly by Dzen → always null
favorites	Not exposed publicly by Dzen → always null
engagementRate	(likes + comments) / views × 100
category	Category / tag
publishedAt	Publish timestamp
scrapedAt	Timestamp of when the data was collected
status	success, unavailable or failed
error	Reason string when not successful, otherwise null

Which metrics are available?

✅ Available	🚫 Not available
views, likes, comments, title, author, authorId, authorUrl, category, publishedAt	dislikes, reposts, favorites — Dzen does not expose these publicly (always null)

Special cases & caveats

• Deleted / private / unavailable publication → status: "unavailable", error: "likely_deleted".
• Unrecognised URL → status: "failed", error: "invalid_url".
• Blocked by Yandex (captcha/SSO) → the request is retried with a fresh proxy session; if it keeps failing the item is marked failed.
• Subscriber count is accurate for both articles and videos. (For video/short pages the count is fetched from the public channel feed API, because the player embeds recommended channels on those pages.)
• Billing: unavailable/failed items go to a separate ERRORS dataset (Storage → Datasets → ERRORS), not the main output — so you are not charged for deleted/private/invalid URLs.

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Notes

• Built with the Apify SDK + Crawlee + Playwright (headless Chromium).
• Endpoints and extraction are documented in ./RESEARCH.md.
• Only public data is collected — do not scrape personal data without a legitimate reason.