| 📺 Channel name | 👍 Number of likes |
| 📱 Social media links | 💬 Comments count |
| 📝 Video title | 🔗 Video URL |
| 🖍 Subtitles | 📍 Channel location |
| 📼 Total videos | 🌐 Channel URL |
| 👀 Number of views | 👁️ Video view count |
| 🧿 Total views | 📈 Number of subscribers |
| ⏱️ Duration | 📅 Release date |
| #️⃣ Hashtags | 📽️ Thumbnails |
#### 🔗 How to scrape YouTube by URL or search term
1. Scraping **by URL 🔗** will get you data from any video, channel, playlist, or search results. You can add as many URLs as you want.
2. Scraping **by search term** 🔑 will get you data from YouTube search results. You can add as many search terms as you want.
| Scraping by URL | Paste a YouTube link to a YouTube video, channel, playlist, or search results page. You can also import a CSV file or Google Sheet with a prepared list of URLs. Then choose how many results you would like to extract and click Start. |
| Scraping using search term | Type in keywords as you would normally do it in the YouTube search bar. Then choose how many results you would like to extract and click Start. |
#### How to filter YouTube videos by date
There are two ways to filter by date, depending on whether you’re scraping videos by URL or by search term.
**When scraping by search term**
To filter videos by date when using search terms, go to the “Add filters” section, and then under “Sorting order” choose “Upload date.”
Alternatively, you can also select videos published in the last hour, day, week, month, or year by selecting the appropriate option under the “Date filter” menu.
**When scraping by URL**
When scraping by URL, go to the input field that says “Date range (applicable only to scraping by channels URL).” There, type in (in absolute or relative numbers) by which date you want to filter the data and whether you want to sort the videos by newest, most popular, or oldest.
#### How to scrape YouTube transcript and subtitles
To get text for a video, use the **Transcription & subtitles** dropdown in the input. It has three options:
- **Only download subtitles (when present on the video)** – downloads the video's existing subtitles (the ones YouTube already provides). Subtitles are added to each dataset item under the `subtitles` field. Videos without subtitles get none.
- **Download subtitles + transcribe videos without subtitles ($)** – downloads existing subtitles when available, and for videos that have none, generates a transcript using speech-to-text AI. The generated transcript is stored in the key-value store and linked from the dataset item via `transcriptionUrl`.
- **Always transcribe ($)** – ignores any existing subtitles and always generates a transcript with speech-to-text AI, linked via `transcriptionUrl`.
Leave the dropdown empty to skip subtitles and transcription entirely.
### ⬆️ Output example
The scraped results will be shown as a dataset which you can find in the **Storage** tab. Note that the output is organized as a table for viewing convenience, but it doesn’t show **all the fields**:
You can preview all the fields and **download the file with YouTube data in various formats** (JSON, CSV, Excel, and more). Here’s a few JSON examples of different YouTube scraping cases:
#### 💁♂️ Channel info
```json
{
"id": "HV6OlMPn5sI",
"title": "Raimu - The Spirit Within 🍃 [lofi hip hop/relaxing beats]",
"duration": "29:54",
"channelName": "Lofi Girl",
"channelUrl": "1 day will get you only today's posts, 2 days - yesterday's and today's, and so on. Note, that if you select this, sorting parameter will be auto-reset to NEWEST
## `sortVideosBy` (type: `string`):
Maps to the sorting buttons on the top of the channel's 'Videos', 'Shorts' and 'Live' pages.
## `aiVideoDescription` (type: `boolean`):
If enabled, uses AI to generate a time-segmented description of the video, covering both visual and audio content for each segment.
## `aiVideoSummary` (type: `boolean`):
If enabled, uses AI to generate a concise conceptual summary of the video covering both visual and audio content.
## `saveSubsToKVS` (type: `boolean`):
If set to true, the scraper will save the downloaded subtitles to the key-value store. Transcripts are always saved to the key-value store
## `preferAutoGeneratedSubtitles` (type: `boolean`):
If set to true, automatically generated subtitles are preferred to user subtitles. Note: a subtitle language must be selected and a subtitle-downloading option must be selected in Transcription & subtitles for this to work.
## Actor input object example
```json
{
"searchQueries": [
"web scraping tutorials"
],
"maxResults": 10,
"maxResultsShorts": 5,
"maxResultStreams": 0,
"startUrls": [
{
"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
}
],
"transcriptionAndSubtitle": "NONE",
"subtitlesLanguage": "en",
"subtitlesFormat": "srt",
"sortingOrder": "relevance",
"dateFilter": "month",
"videoType": "video",
"lengthFilter": "between420",
"oldestPostDate": "2024-01-01",
"sortVideosBy": "NEWEST",
"aiVideoDescription": false,
"aiVideoSummary": false
}
```
# Actor output Schema
## `dataset` (type: `string`):
Dataset containing scraped YouTube video information
# API
You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.
## JavaScript example
```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';
// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '