YouTube Channel Lookalike Finder discovers and ranks channels similar to seed creators, exporting shared topics, audience similarity, subscriber and video counts, rank, discovery query, and seed provenance for every recommendation.
Use it to expand sponsorship prospect lists, map competitors, discover creators in the same niche, or give an AI agent a structured set of adjacent channels instead of a loose keyword-search page.
Quick start
- Add one or more channel URLs,
@handles, orUCchannel IDs toseedChannels. - Set the desired number of matches and optional subscriber range.
- Run the Actor and export ranked lookalikes to CSV, JSON, Excel, XML, or your API workflow.
Example output
{
"seedChannelName": "OpenAI",
"rank": 1,
"similarityScore": 86,
"channelName": "Example AI Channel",
"channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCexample",
"sharedTopics": ["artificial intelligence", "developer tools"],
"subscriberCount": 245000,
"videoCount": 318,
"audienceSimilarity": "similar",
"discoveryQuery": "OpenAI artificial intelligence developer tools",
"collectedAt": "2026-08-11T20:00:00.000Z"
}
What data you get
Each row includes the seed channel name and URL, recommendation rank, similarity score, candidate channel name, URL and ID, description, handle, thumbnail, subscriber and video counts when visible, shared topics, an audience-size comparison, discovery query, and collection time. The seed provenance lets you keep separate rankings when the same channel is relevant to several seeds.
Input settings
| Setting | JSON key | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Seed YouTube channels | seedChannels |
Add 1–10 channel URLs, @handles, or UC channel IDs. |
| Maximum matches per seed | maxMatchesPerSeed |
Save up to this many ranked lookalike channels for each seed. |
| Country | country |
Two-letter country code used to localize YouTube search, such as US, GB, or PT. |
| Language | language |
YouTube interface/search language such as en, pt, or en-GB. |
| Minimum subscribers | minSubscribers |
Exclude visible channels below this subscriber count. Channels without a visible count are treated as zero. |
| Maximum subscribers | maxSubscribers |
Optional upper subscriber limit. Leave empty for no maximum. |
| Run time limit in seconds | runTimeSecs |
Stop admitting new searches before this shared deadline. Use 30–270 seconds. |
| Proxy configuration | proxyConfiguration |
Optional Apify proxy settings for advanced users. |
Input recipes
Find twenty adjacent channels:
{"seedChannels":["https://www.youtube.com/@OpenAI"],"maxMatchesPerSeed":20,"country":"US","language":"en"}
Find mid-sized sponsorship candidates:
{"seedChannels":["@OpenAI"],"maxMatchesPerSeed":30,"minSubscribers":10000,"maxSubscribers":500000}
Who is it for?
- Sponsorship teams expanding from creators that already perform well.
- Influencer agencies building niche-specific YouTube prospect lists.
- Competitive intelligence teams mapping neighboring channels.
- Media buyers comparing reachable audience bands.
- Developers and AI agents creating repeatable creator-discovery workflows.
Tips and limits
- A run accepts a maximum of ten seeds and saves up to fifty matches per seed.
- Similarity is an explainable discovery score based on public topics, text, and visible audience information; it is not YouTube's private recommendation score.
- Subscriber or video counts may be nullable when a channel hides them or YouTube does not expose them in the result.
- Public channels and search availability can change. Keep seed and discovery-query fields when reviewing results.
- Narrow subscriber filters can legitimately produce fewer than the requested maximum.
API usage
curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/fetch_cat~youtube-channel-lookalike-finder/runs?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"seedChannels":["@OpenAI"],"maxMatchesPerSeed":10}'
JavaScript:
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';
const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });
const run = await client.actor('fetch_cat/youtube-channel-lookalike-finder').call({
seedChannels: ['@OpenAI'], maxMatchesPerSeed: 10,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
Python:
import os
from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient(os.environ['APIFY_TOKEN'])
run = client.actor('fetch_cat/youtube-channel-lookalike-finder').call(run_input={
'seedChannels': ['@OpenAI'], 'maxMatchesPerSeed': 10,
})
items = client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).list_items().items
Use with MCP and AI agents
Connect the official Apify MCP server at https://mcp.apify.com?tools=fetch_cat/youtube-channel-lookalike-finder or configure:
{"mcpServers":{"apify":{"url":"https://mcp.apify.com?tools=fetch_cat/youtube-channel-lookalike-finder"}}}
Try: “Find 20 YouTube channels similar to OpenAI, then rank only channels with 10,000–500,000 subscribers,” or “Compare the shared topics across lookalikes for these three seed channels.”
Support
Open an issue from the Actor page and provide the run ID or run URL, input JSON, expected output, actual output, and one reproducible public seed-channel URL. That evidence lets us distinguish filtering, availability, and extraction problems quickly.
