YouTube Scraper

Search public YouTube results or inspect a public channel videos tab and return normalized video metadata: title, URL, channel, duration, views, published time, thumbnail, and description snippets.

Socialv0.1.0~1 credit/runApify StoreSource on GitHub

Overview

YouTube Scraper gives agents a focused way to collect public YouTube video metadata without using a private account. It renders search results or a channel videos tab through Better Fetch, parses YouTube's public page data, deduplicates video cards, and returns normalized fields that are easy to save, compare, or pass into an LLM workflow.

Last validated: Jul 3, 2026

Playground

Input

querystring

YouTube search query. Use either query or channel_url.

channel_urlstring (uri)

Public YouTube channel URL. The tool reads its videos tab.

max_resultsintegerdefault: 10

Maximum video cards to return

Output

countintegerrequired

Number of videos returned

sourcestringrequired

Search query or channel URL used

videosobject[]required

Public YouTube video cards

source_urlstringrequired

Fetched YouTube URL

Examples

search-openai

{
  "query": "openai",
  "max_results": 3
}

Use cases

Video research

Search YouTube for a topic and return structured video cards for market research, content planning, or source discovery.

Channel monitoring

Inspect a public channel videos tab and capture recent titles, URLs, view counts, durations, thumbnails, and publish-time labels.

Agent briefs

Let an agent gather public YouTube results and summarize visible metadata before deciding which videos need deeper review.

FAQ

Does YouTube Scraper download video files?

No. It returns public metadata from YouTube pages and does not download video media, captions, private analytics, or account-only data.

Can it scrape private or age-gated videos?

No. The tool is designed for public YouTube pages visible to the Better Fetch browser session without user-specific authentication.

Why are view counts returned as text and numbers?

YouTube often renders compact labels such as 1.2M views. The tool preserves the visible text and also returns a best-effort integer when it can parse one.

Use it anywhere

MCP (Claude, Cursor, any client)

# Add the Better Fetch MCP connector (or paste the URL into
# Claude → Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector):
claude mcp add --transport http better-fetch https://betterfetch.co/api/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer bf_your_key_here"

# Then ask for the tool by name: youtube_scraper

REST

curl -sS -X POST "https://betterfetch.co/api/tools/youtube_scraper/run" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer bf_your_key_here" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"input": {"query":"openai","max_results":3}}'

Run locally

git clone https://github.com/better-fetch/youtube-scraper && cd youtube-scraper && npm i
BETTER_FETCH_API_KEY=bf_your_key_here npx bf-tool run --input '{"query":"openai","max_results":3}'