YouTube Autocomplete Keyword Scraper: search suggestions a to z

YouTube's own search suggestions for up to 500 seed keywords per run, per country and language, with optional a-to-z and question-word expansion for hundreds of long-tail video keywords per seed, ranked as YouTube ranks them. Pay per suggestion.

Why this scraper

• Only delivered results are charged. Inputs that fail come back as clear error records at no cost.
• The endpoint the YouTube search box itself uses, half a kilobyte per call: a seed with question-word expansion costs eleven small requests. Measured on the platform: three seeds, 109 suggestions, for fifteen hundredths of a cent.
• YouTube's own suggestions in YouTube's own order, not the Google web mix: what people type into YouTube in a given country and language. A-to-z expansion, ten question patterns and your own prefixes or suffixes turn one seed into hundreds of long-tail video keywords, de-duplicated and ranked in the order they surfaced. Suggestions that do not carry the seed are dropped, so an expansion never delivers unrelated rows.

Who this is for

Paste seed keywords in keywords (up to 500 per run), set country and language, switch on expandAlphabet or expandQuestions or add customPrefixes (use * for the seed position), and set maxSuggestionsPerKeyword (default 200). Every row carries the seed, the exact query that surfaced the suggestion, the rank, the suggestion, country and language.

Who this is not for

YouTube returns at most about fourteen suggestions per query, so the numbers come from expansion, not from one call. The question patterns are English; for other languages set your own via customPrefixes. YouTube completes almost any prefix, so a seed nobody searches for still yields a few rows built on that seed. There are no search volumes here: pair the output with the Google Trends actors below for demand.

Input example

{
    "keywords": [
        "how to edit video",
        "air fryer recipe"
    ],
    "country": "US",
    "language": "en",
    "expandAlphabet": false,
    "expandQuestions": false,
    "customPrefixes": [],
    "maxSuggestionsPerKeyword": 200
}

Output example

• keyword
• query
• rank
• suggestion
• country
• language

Error codes: INVALID_KEYWORD, NO_SUGGESTIONS, BLOCKED.

One delivered row looks like this:

{
  "keyword": "air fryer",
  "query": "air fryer",
  "rank": 1,
  "suggestion": "air fryer recipes",
  "country": "US",
  "language": "en",
  "status": "ok"
}

Related actors from steadydata

• google-autocomplete: the same expansion on Google web search
• youtube-search: the videos that rank for the suggested keywords
• google-trends-compare: which suggestion is searched for more

Pricing

Pay per event: one suggestion-listed event per delivered result. No charge for inputs that fail, no separate platform-usage surcharge.

Free Apify plan: this actor delivers up to 25 rows per run for accounts on the Apify free plan, and then stops with a message. That limit is set by us, not by Apify. It exists so the actor keeps paying for itself for the people who do pay. Any paid Apify plan runs it at full size, billed per delivered row, with failed rows never charged.

Reviews: if this actor saves you time, a short review on this page is the one thing that helps most. Ratings are what other buyers look at first, and we have no other way to ask.

FAQ

How is this different from the Google Autocomplete actor? Same expansion logic, different source: this one asks YouTube's search box, so the suggestions are video searches.

Can I get search volume? Not from autocomplete; YouTube publishes none. Use Google Trends Compare on the suggestions that matter.

Which country and language should I set? The market you make videos for: country sets the storefront (gl), language the interface language (hl).

How many rows per seed? Around ten for the seed alone, up to a few hundred with a-to-z and question expansion, capped by maxSuggestionsPerKeyword.

Do I pay for a seed without suggestions? No, that is a free error row.

Is personal data collected? query is the exact prefix sent to YouTube (for example air fryer c or how air fryer); rank counts across all expansions in the order the suggestions surfaced.

What happens when the source changes? Sources change from time to time; that is the nature of this work. The actor is monitored daily and fixed fast, and while it is broken you are not charged, because only delivered results cost anything.