If you want to scrape information from YouTube easily, you're in the right place! Whether you're working on a personal project, academic research, or professional analysis, understanding how to gather data from YouTube can be incredibly useful.

Scrape YouTube data with Python illustration.

There are several APIs you can use:

Video Tutorial

If you prefer to watch a video, feel free to take a look at this one:

Tools Introduction

We'll use the official Python library by SerpApi: serpapi-python . And... that's the only tool that we need!

Python library from SerpApi, the tool we need to scrape Google SERP
As a side note: You can use this library to scrape search results from other search engines, not just YouTube.

Usually, you'll write your DIY solution using something like BeautifulSoup, Selenium, Puppeteer, Requests, etc., to scrape YouTube. You can relax since we perform all these heavy tasks for you. No need to worry about all the problems you might've encountered while implementing your web scraping solution.

Step-by-step scraping YouTube data with Python

Without further ado, let's start and collect data from the YouTube site.

Step 1: Setup and preparation

  • Sign up for free at SerpApi. You can get 250 free searches per month.
  • Get your SerpApi Api Key from this page.
  • Create a new .env file, and assign a new env variable with value from API_KEY above.
    SERPAPI_KEY=$YOUR_SERPAPI_KEY_HERE
  • Install python-dotenv to read the .env file with
    pip install python-dotenv
  • Install SerpApi's Python library with
    pip install serpapi
  • Create new main.py file for the main program.

Your folder structure will look like this:

|_ .env
|_ main.py

Step 2: Write the code for scraping YouTube search results

To use the YouTube Search API, we only need the search query as a parameter. Here is how the basic search works:

import os
import serpapi
from dotenv import load_dotenv

# Load env file and API_Key
load_dotenv()
api_key = os.getenv('SERPAPI_KEY')

# Perform a basic search
client = serpapi.Client(api_key=api_key)
search =  client.search(
    engine="youtube",
    search_query="fit and fun" # You can change this query to anything
  )

print(search)

Here is the JSON response. As you can see, it matches what YouTube actually shows.

Youtube scrape result

Optional: You can also add a gl or hl parameter to adjust the results with the geolocation or language that you want.

Paginate YouTube result

By default, this API only returns the first page of the results. Just like searching on the YouTube site directly, we need to do pagination in order to grab all the results.

You can add a token for the next page on the sp parameter. We provide this next_page_token at each response on the serpapi_pagination > next_page_token response.

Here is a simple example for grabbing the next page:

client = serpapi.Client(api_key=api_key)
search =  client.search(
    engine="youtube",
    search_query="fit and fun",
  )

if "serpapi_pagination" in search:
  search = client.search(
    engine="youtube",
    search_query="fit and fun",
    sp=search["serpapi_pagination"]["next_page_token"]
  )
# second page result

Now let's automate this process with a while loop:

client = serpapi.Client(api_key=api_key)
search =  client.search(
    engine="youtube",
    search_query="fit and fun",
  )
# first page results, print number of video results
print(len(search["video_results"]))

MAX_PAGES = 10
while "serpapi_pagination" in search:
  search = client.search(
    engine="youtube",
    search_query="fit and fun",
    sp=search["serpapi_pagination"]["next_page_token"]
  )
  print(len(search["video_results"]))

  # It's recommended to limit the number of pages to avoid infinite loop
  MAX_PAGES -= 1
  if MAX_PAGES <= 0:
    break

print("done")

What data is available from this API?

You're able to get the following data:

  • search video results
  • Youtube ads_results
  • Top news / latest
  • Channel result
  • Movie result
  • Playlist result
  • Shorts result

Scraping video details on YouTube

You can also get the video detail data from YouTube Video API. You'll need the video ID as a parameter. Use the video ID as v parameter value.

Youtube Video API illustration

Here is the code sample:

client = serpapi.Client(api_key=api_key)
search =  client.search(
    engine="youtube_video",
    v="DK-nzoXukbg"
)

print(search)

With this, you can collect information about this video, including:

  • title
  • thumbnail
  • views
  • likes
  • description
  • chapters
  • related_videos

Here is the complete tutorial for scraping YouTube videos:

Scrape YouTube videos in Python
Learn how to scrape YouTube videos using a simple API by SerpApi in Python.
SerpApiHilman Ramadhan

Scraping YouTube Channel

You can also collect data from a specific channel using our YouTube Channel API. We're also able to return Shorts, Podcasts, Posts, or other tabs data on the channel.

YouTube Channel API sample response

Here is the complete tutorial:

Scrape YouTube Channel Data with SerpApi
If you’re tracking YouTube channels for competitor research, content strategy, or creator partnerships, you probably want answers for: How often is a competitor uploading? Are shorter videos performing better? Is a creator’s subscriber count actually growing? The data is all there on YouTube. But tracking all of it
SerpApiSrujana Maddula

Scraping ad results on YouTube

YouTube has a daily huge traffic. It makes sense for some companies to advertise their product here. If you'd like to monitor your competitor ads on YouTube, you can scrape the ad results whenever it's available using our YouTube Search API.

Ad sample from YouTube Search results

That's it! I hope you enjoyed reading this guide.