YouTube Comments Scraper — Comments, Replies, Authors & Likes

Scrape public YouTube comments and replies from videos and Shorts without a YouTube API key, account, or quota, then export text, authors, likes, dates, and thread metadata.

What you get from the YouTube Comments Scraper

Turn YouTube conversations into structured rows for sentiment analysis, audience research, creator intelligence, moderation, and brand monitoring. Add one or many video URLs or IDs, select newest or popular ordering, choose whether to include replies, and export the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, RSS, or HTML.

The Actor accepts regular videos, Shorts, live and embed URLs, youtu.be links, and bare 11-character video IDs. It uses publicly visible YouTube data and does not consume YouTube Data API quota.

Quick start

1. Add one or more YouTube video URLs or IDs.
2. Choose Newest first for monitoring or Most popular for audience research.
3. Set a per-video result limit and decide whether to include replies.
4. Click Start, then open or export the comment dataset.

YouTube comment output fields

Field	Description
cid	Public YouTube comment identifier, when available
text	Full public comment or reply text
author	Public commenter display name
channel	Public commenter channel URL or identifier, when available
votes	Public like count shown for the comment
time	Human-readable posting time shown by YouTube
time_parsed	Structured posting timestamp when it can be derived
photo	Public commenter profile-image URL, when available
heart	Whether the creator-heart marker is present, when available
reply / is_reply	Indicates that the row is a reply, when supplied by YouTube
videoId	Source YouTube video ID
videoUrl	Canonical source video URL

YouTube does not expose every field on every comment. Optional values may be empty when they are not publicly shown.

Example YouTube comment output

{
  "cid": "Ugx1AbCDefGhijkLmN4AaABAg",
  "text": "The explanation at 4:12 finally made this topic click for me.",
  "author": "Alex R.",
  "channel": "https://www.youtube.com/@alexresearch",
  "votes": 128,
  "time": "2 days ago",
  "time_parsed": 1784073600,
  "photo": "https://yt3.ggpht.com/example",
  "heart": false,
  "reply": false,
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
}

YouTube Comments Scraper input parameters

Parameter	Required	Default	Description
videoUrls	Yes	Example video	YouTube watch, Shorts, live, embed, or youtu.be URLs, or bare 11-character video IDs.
maxCommentsPerVideo	No	50	Maximum combined comments and replies returned for each video, from 1 to 100,000.
sort	No	recent	Comment order: recent for newest first or popular for YouTube's popular ordering.
language	No	en	Language code used for YouTube-generated labels, such as en, de, or es.
includeReplies	No	true	Include publicly available replies. Disable it for top-level comments only.

Example input

{
  "videoUrls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aqz-KE-bpKQ"
  ],
  "maxCommentsPerVideo": 500,
  "sort": "recent",
  "language": "en",
  "includeReplies": true
}

YouTube comment data use cases

• Brands and social-listening teams: Track customer reactions, complaints, questions, and competitor mentions.
• Creators and agencies: Discover recurring audience interests, content ideas, and highly engaged viewers.
• Researchers and analysts: Build comment datasets for sentiment, topic, language, and community analysis.
• Moderation teams: Review public discussion at scale and prioritize high-engagement threads.
• Developers and AI teams: Connect comment data to dashboards, classifiers, retrieval systems, or scheduled workflows.

YouTube Comments Scraper limitations

• Only publicly visible comments are returned. Private, deleted, held-for-review, members-only, or otherwise restricted comments are unavailable.
• Videos with comments disabled, private videos, deleted videos, and unavailable regional content can return no rows.
• This Actor accepts video URLs and IDs. It does not expand channel or playlist URLs into videos.
• maxCommentsPerVideo limits the combined accepted rows. When replies are enabled, replies can count toward that limit.
• Relative dates such as “2 months ago” are only as precise as YouTube's public label.
• Result order follows YouTube's public newest or popular ordering and can change over time.

Compared to other YouTube comment scrapers

• Compared with lurkapi/youtube-comments-scraper, this Actor focuses on direct video and Shorts inputs with a compact setup rather than channel expansion, playlist expansion, keyword filters, or date filters.
• Compared with api-ninja/youtube-comments-scraper and apihq/youtube-comments-scraper, it supports the same core video-comment workflow while offering a very high per-video limit and straightforward control over ordering, replies, and language labels.
• Choose this Actor for simple bulk extraction from video URLs you already know. Choose a channel-expansion tool when discovering videos from a channel or playlist is part of the job.

YouTube Comments Scraper FAQ

Do I need a YouTube Data API key?

No. Add public video URLs or IDs and run the Actor without providing a Google Cloud project, API key, YouTube account, or copied cookies.

Does it work with YouTube Shorts?

Yes. Shorts URLs, regular watch URLs, youtu.be links, live URLs, embed URLs, and bare video IDs are accepted.

Can I scrape comments from multiple videos?

Yes. Add multiple values to videoUrls. The result limit is applied separately to each valid video.

Can I scrape only top-level comments?

Yes. Set includeReplies to false. The Actor filters reply rows while continuing until it fills the requested top-level-comment limit when enough comments exist.

Why did a video return zero comments?

Comments may be disabled, the video may be private or unavailable, or YouTube may not expose public comments for that video at the time of the run. Check that the URL opens publicly and retry later.

Can I monitor new comments automatically?

Yes. Choose recent, create an Apify schedule, and send each dataset to a webhook, database, spreadsheet, Slack workflow, or another integration.

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Last verified: 2026-07