YouTube Comments Scraper

Extract public YouTube video comments and replies at scale.

This Apify actor helps teams collect public comment data from YouTube videos for social listening, creator analytics, moderation research, brand monitoring, audience research, and community reporting.

It accepts YouTube video URLs or video IDs, reads public comment threads, and saves clean dataset rows with author, text, timestamps, reply metadata, and source video details.

At a glance

• Input: YouTube video URLs or video IDs, per-video comment cap, sort order, reply mode, and optional proxy settings.
• Output: One dataset row per public comment or reply with video details, author display fields, text, likes, reply metadata, and timestamps.
• Best for: Social listening, creator analytics, moderation research, brand monitoring, audience research, and community reporting.
• Pricing unit: A start event per run plus one comment event for each saved public comment or reply row.
• Login required: No. The Actor reads public YouTube comment data only.

What can it do?

YouTube Comments Scraper collects public comments from one or more YouTube videos.

Use it when you need structured comment data instead of manually scrolling through a video page.

The actor returns one dataset item per comment or reply.

Each row includes the video ID, canonical video URL, video title, comment ID, author name, author channel URL, text, visible published time, reply relationship fields, requested sort mode, and scrape timestamp.

Who is it for?

Social listening teams

Track what viewers say about a campaign, product, creator, brand mention, or announcement video.

Creators and channel managers

Export comments for content planning, community analysis, moderation workflows, and audience research.

Agencies

Collect public viewer feedback across client videos and competitor videos for recurring reporting.

Researchers

Analyze public conversations around media, politics, education, entertainment, and cultural trends.

Support and community teams

Find repeated complaints, questions, feature requests, or praise in video comment sections.

Why use this actor?

• Export comments into JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or HTML from Apify datasets.
• Process multiple public videos in one run.
• Include reply metadata so nested conversations stay understandable.
• Use stable IDs such as commentId, parentCommentId, and videoId for deduplication and follow-up analysis.
• Run repeatable workflows manually, on a schedule, through the API, or from automation tools.
• Connect output to spreadsheets, BI dashboards, sentiment tools, moderation queues, or LLM pipelines.

Input notes

YouTube video URLs

Paste one or more public YouTube video URLs.

Supported examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dQw4w9WgXcQ

YouTube video IDs

If you already have video IDs, enter them directly.

dQw4w9WgXcQ

Maximum comments per video

Set a cap to control run size and cost.

For a quick test, use 10 to 25 comments.

For monitoring, increase the limit based on the size of the videos you track.

Sort order

Choose top comments or newest comments.

Newest-first depends on what YouTube exposes for the selected video at run time.

Include replies

Enable replies when you want conversation context.

Disable replies when you only need top-level comments.

Proxy configuration

The actor supports Apify Proxy configuration.

Automatic proxy settings are a good default for most runs.

Use residential proxy only if your workload is throttled.

Example input

{
  "videoUrls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
  ],
  "maxCommentsPerVideo": 25,
  "sort": "top",
  "includeReplies": true,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

Example output

{
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "videoTitle": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video) (4K Remaster)",
  "commentId": "Ugzge340dBgB75hWBm54AaABAg",
  "parentCommentId": null,
  "isReply": false,
  "authorName": "@YouTube",
  "authorChannelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@YouTube",
  "authorThumbnailUrl": "https://yt3.ggpht.com/example=s88-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj",
  "text": "can confirm: he never gave us up",
  "likeCount": 255000,
  "publishedTimeText": "1 year ago",
  "replyCount": 960,
  "sort": "top",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-06-16T14:21:28.786Z"
}

How to scrape YouTube comments

1. Open the actor on Apify.
2. Paste one or more YouTube video URLs.
3. Set the maximum number of comments per video.
4. Choose top or newest sort.
5. Decide whether to include replies.
6. Click Start.
7. Download the dataset in your preferred format.

Tips for best results

• Start with a small limit to confirm the video has public comments.
• Use video IDs if you already have a list from another workflow.
• Disable replies when you only need high-level audience sentiment.
• Schedule recurring runs for campaign monitoring.
• Deduplicate downstream by commentId if you run the same video repeatedly.
• Use scrapedAt to compare comment exports over time.

Common use cases

• Brand sentiment tracking on product launch videos.
• Creator audience analysis across recent uploads.
• Exporting comments for moderation review.
• Detecting recurring customer questions.
• Researching public reaction to news or entertainment videos.
• Building datasets for natural language processing.
• Monitoring competitor campaign responses.

Integrations

Send results to Google Sheets through Apify integrations.

Load dataset exports into BigQuery, Snowflake, Airtable, or your BI stack.

Trigger the actor from Zapier, Make, n8n, GitHub Actions, or a custom backend.

Use webhooks to notify your team when a recurring monitoring run finishes.

API usage with Node.js

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });

const run = await client.actor('fetch_cat/youtube-comments-scraper').call({
  videoUrls: ['https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ'],
  maxCommentsPerVideo: 25,
  sort: 'top',
  includeReplies: true,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

API usage with Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient('MY-APIFY-TOKEN')

run = client.actor('fetch_cat/youtube-comments-scraper').call(run_input={
    'videoUrls': ['https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ'],
    'maxCommentsPerVideo': 25,
    'sort': 'top',
    'includeReplies': True,
})

items = client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).list_items().items
print(items)

API usage with cURL

curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/fetch_cat~youtube-comments-scraper/runs?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "videoUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"],
    "maxCommentsPerVideo": 25,
    "sort": "top",
    "includeReplies": true
  }'

MCP and AI agents

You can run this actor from Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and other MCP-compatible tools through Apify MCP.

Use this MCP URL pattern:

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch_cat/youtube-comments-scraper

Claude Code setup:

claude mcp add apify-youtube-comments https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch_cat/youtube-comments-scraper

Claude Desktop JSON configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify-youtube-comments": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch_cat/youtube-comments-scraper"
    }
  }
}

Example prompts:

• "Scrape the top 50 comments from this YouTube video and summarize the main viewer reactions."
• "Export public comments from these three video URLs and identify common product complaints."
• "Run the YouTube Comments Scraper for this video ID and group comments by sentiment."

Scheduling

Create a schedule in Apify Console to monitor the same video list daily, weekly, or monthly.

Scheduled runs are useful for campaigns, launches, music videos, trailers, tutorials, and recurring brand mentions.

Data quality notes

YouTube can change what it exposes for individual videos.

Some videos have comments disabled.

Some comments may be hidden, moderated, removed, region-limited, or unavailable.

Visible like counts and reply counts may not be available for every row.

Troubleshooting

Why did I get zero comments?

The video may have comments disabled, may be private or deleted, may be age restricted, or YouTube may not expose comments for that request.

Try another public video with visible comments and a small limit.

Why are some fields null?

YouTube does not expose every field for every comment.

The actor keeps the row instead of inventing values.

Should I use residential proxy?

Usually no.

Start with the default proxy settings.

Use residential only if YouTube throttles your specific workload.

Legality and privacy

This actor is designed to collect publicly visible YouTube comments.

Do not use it to collect private, account-only, or restricted data.

You are responsible for using the data in accordance with applicable laws, platform terms, and privacy requirements.

Avoid collecting more data than you need.

Limitations

This actor does not use private accounts.

It does not bypass paywalls, login walls, or private video restrictions.

It cannot return comments that YouTube itself does not expose for the public video page.