Researching a topic on YouTube usually means opening video after video. Give a search instead, such as “how to use claude code” or “nvidia earnings”, and get one row per result with the full transcript, in the order YouTube shows them (searchRank), with title, channel, duration and views.
searchQueries: any keyword or phrase; maxVideosPerSearch up to 500 (20 results per page).sortBy (relevance, date, views, rating), uploadDate (hour to year), videoDuration (under 4, 4-20 or over 20 minutes).onlyNewVideos: true on a schedule turns a search into an alert: each run returns only videos not delivered before.from apify_client import ApifyClient # pip install apify-client
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("fguiraud/youtube-transcript-scraper").call(run_input={
"searchQueries": [
"how to use claude code"
],
"maxVideosPerSearch": 10,
"outputs": [
"text"
]
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
print(item.get("searchRank"), item["title"], "-", item.get("wordCount"), "words")
No Python? Open the Actor page, paste your input in the form and press Start; results export to JSON, CSV or Excel.
Fields from a real run on 2026-10-08 (long values shortened):
{
"videoId": "3aKVArutiIU",
"status": "ok",
"searchQuery": "how to use claude code",
"searchRank": 2,
"title": "Learn 80% of Claude Code in 10 Minutes (2026 Tutorial)",
"channel": "Sajjaad Khader",
"durationSeconds": 596,
"viewCount": 341374,
"wordCount": 2056,
"text": "I have been obsessed with Claude Code for the last eight months because this is the tool that will actually make you a top 1% software engineer even if you have no prior experience. With Claude Code, you can code, plan,..."
}
$0.003 per transcript. Searching is free; videos without captions are not charged.
Are the results the same as in my browser?
They follow YouTube’s order for a signed-out visitor in the US, so they can differ slightly from a signed-in search.
Can I get only new videos about a topic?
Yes: sort by date, turn on onlyNewVideos and schedule the run; each run returns only videos earlier runs did not deliver.
Can an AI agent use it?
Yes. It is an MCP server at https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fguiraud/youtube-transcript-scraper (listed in the official MCP registry), and there is an agent skill for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. Field-name guesses such as url or urls are accepted.