YouTube Shorts Scraper

Scrape YouTube Shorts by keyword, hashtag, or channel - with view, like, and comment counts, duration, tags, hashtags, and the channel behind every Short. No login or cookies required.

Give it a list of search terms, #hashtags, or channels, and it returns one clean row per Short, ready to export to JSON, CSV, Excel, or Google Sheets.

What you get

For every Short:

• videoId, url, title, description
• publishedAt and durationSeconds
• viewCount, likeCount, commentCount
• channelId, channelTitle, channelUrl - the creator behind the Short
• thumbnailUrl - the vertical cover frame
• tags (creator-set tags) and hashtags (extracted from the title and description)
• language - the declared audio or metadata language when available
• sourceType / sourceQuery / position - which query, hashtag, or channel surfaced the Short and its rank

Results are de-duplicated across all queries in a run.

Use cases

• Trend research - see which Shorts are winning for a keyword or hashtag right now, sorted by views or upload date
• Competitor analysis - pull a channel's full Shorts catalog with engagement metrics and spot their best-performing formats
• Influencer discovery - find creators posting Shorts in your niche and rank them by views and engagement
• Content ideation - mine titles, hashtags, and tags from top Shorts to plan your own
• Hashtag monitoring - track new Shorts posted under a campaign or brand hashtag
• Dataset building - collect thousands of labelled Shorts for analysis or model training

How to use

1. Enter one or more Search queries or hashtags, one per line. Start an entry with # to search a hashtag (for example #homeworkout).
2. Optionally enter one or more Channels - handles (@mkbhd), channel URLs, or UC... IDs - to scrape their Shorts tab.
3. Set Max Items per query (default 100, 0 for everything YouTube returns, up to 5,000 per query).
4. For searches, choose Sort by (relevance, view count, or upload date) and Uploaded within (24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, or a year).
5. Run the actor - results stream into the Dataset tab as they are found.

Channel Shorts tabs are always returned newest first.

Output format

Each dataset record:

{
  "videoId": "HcvRafAt9eY",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HcvRafAt9eY",
  "title": "Vegan mushroom pâté 🍄 #cooking #veganrecipes #plantbased",
  "description": "Rich, savory and ridiculously good on toasted bread...",
  "publishedAt": "2026-09-03T13:00:37Z",
  "durationSeconds": 58,
  "viewCount": 6512,
  "likeCount": 412,
  "commentCount": 18,
  "channelId": "UC1bBqwotWgZ99ZDWwv0eh0g",
  "channelTitle": "Soy Boy",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1bBqwotWgZ99ZDWwv0eh0g",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/HcvRafAt9eY/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "tags": ["vegan", "pate", "mushroom"],
  "hashtags": ["cooking", "veganrecipes", "plantbased"],
  "language": "en",
  "sourceType": "search",
  "sourceQuery": "vegan cooking",
  "position": 1
}

Pricing

You pay a small fixed amount per Short returned. There is no charge for queries or channels that return nothing.

Tips

• Combine Sort by: View count with Uploaded within: Last 7 days to surface what is trending in a niche this week.
• Hashtag entries are matched exactly, so #homeworkout and #homeworkouts are different searches.
• Set Max Items per query to 0 when you want a channel's complete Shorts back catalog.
• If YouTube begins blocking requests from the default network, enable Proxy configuration with Apify Proxy.

FAQ

Does this download the videos? No. It returns metadata and links. Pair it with a video downloader actor if you need the media files.

Can I scrape a channel's regular videos too? This actor is dedicated to Shorts. Use the YouTube Channel Videos Scraper for long-form uploads and live streams.

Why are some Shorts longer than 60 seconds? YouTube now allows Shorts up to three minutes. Anything YouTube lists in the Shorts feed is included.