The short version
Pick it if
- You need YouTube search results as a viewer sees them, with Shorts and channel shelves
- You already use SerpApi for Google and want YouTube on the same key
- You value docs, uptime tooling and a legal shield over price
Skip it if
- You’re fetching thousands of videos, comments or transcripts
- You want creator data: subscriber lists, audiences or contacts
- You need TikTok or X as well
SerpApi is a search-results API first, covering Google and more than 100 other engines. Founded in 2017, based in Austin and reported as bootstrapped, it has four YouTube engines: search, video (which also pages through comments and replies), transcripts and, since September 2026, channels. They return what the page shows, including Shorts and channel shelves in search, and channel tabs for videos, Shorts, streams, podcasts, playlists and community posts. Its docs are the best in our YouTube ranking.
Price is the problem. Every call is one “search”: $25 a month buys 1,000, and the $75 Developer plan buys 5,000, or $15 per 1,000. That’s about ten times what ScrapeCreators or Influship charge for the same video pages or transcripts. It ranks fifth for YouTube: the pick for search results, not for creator data at volume.
SerpApi at a glance
- Company
- SerpApi, LLC
- Headquarters
- Austin, Texas
- Founded
- 2017, by Julien Khaleghy (still CEO)
- Funding
- Reported as bootstrapped
- YouTube engines
- Search, video, transcript, channel
- Product type
- Live search-results API, with a free 1-hour cache
- Billing
- Monthly subscription, counted in searches
- Plans from
- $25 a month for 1,000 searches
- Free tier
- 250 searches a month
- Output
- JSON, HTML or Markdown
- Legal Shield
- Up to $2M, from the $150 Production plan
- Other social platforms
- Instagram and Facebook profiles; no TikTok or X
Pricing
A month-to-month subscription counted in successful searches. Every YouTube call is one search, whether it’s a results page, a video, a page of comments, a transcript or a channel tab, so paging through comments costs a search per page. Cached, errored and failed searches are free. There’s no overage: you renew early when you run out. Full refunds within 7 days unless you’ve used more than 20% of your searches. Larger Cloud plans run to 54 million searches a month.
100,000 YouTube requests a month, compared
At each provider’s entry rate, before volume discounts, from our YouTube ranking.
Using SerpApi
Signing up
The Free plan gives you 250 searches a month, and paid plans are month to month with no commitment. Each plan also caps hourly throughput, from 50 searches an hour on Free to 1,000 on Developer.
Making a request
You pick an engine and pass your key as an api_key query parameter: engine=youtube with search_query for search, youtube_video for a video, youtube_video_transcript for captions, youtube_channel for a channel. Comments and replies page through the video engine with tokens, sorted by top or newest. Calls are synchronous by default, with an async mode; output comes as JSON, raw HTML or Markdown, and json_restrictor trims the payload to the fields you want. Identical queries within an hour come from cache for free unless you set no_cache=true.
Documentation
The best in our YouTube ranking: a page per engine with a live playground, a Markdown copy of every page, an llms.txt, a public roadmap and a weekly changelog. The one gap is that the YouTube comment object isn’t documented. A public metrics page shows success rates and response times for each engine, by SerpApi’s own measure.
Support
Support is by email, with priority support on Cloud plans. G2 and Capterra reviewers praise it more than anything else about SerpApi.
Verdict
Pick SerpApi when you need YouTube search results as a viewer sees them, or you already pay for it for Google. It has the best docs here, failed and cached calls are free, and its Legal Shield is a real comfort from $150 a month. For creator data at volume, skip it: every video page, transcript and page of comments costs a search, at roughly ten times what ScrapeCreators or Influship charge. And watch the courts: Google’s case over Google Search was dismissed in July 2026, partly with leave to amend, while a New York court let Reddit’s similar claims proceed the same month.
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Questions
Can SerpApi scrape YouTube?
Yes. It has four YouTube engines: search, video (including comments and replies), transcripts and, since September 2026, channels, with tabs for videos, Shorts, streams, podcasts, playlists and community posts.
How much does SerpApi cost for YouTube?
Every YouTube call is one search. Plans start at $25 a month for 1,000 searches, $75 for 5,000 and $150 for 15,000, and there’s a free plan with 250 a month. Cached and failed searches don’t count.
Does SerpApi get YouTube transcripts?
Yes, through its YouTube Video Transcript engine, which takes a video ID and a language code and falls back to the first available language. Each transcript costs one search.
Can SerpApi get subscriber lists or creator emails?
No. It returns channel subscriber and video counts, but no subscriber lists, audience demographics, contact emails or historical stats.
What is the Google v. SerpApi lawsuit?
Google sued in December 2025, claiming SerpApi got around its bot protection on Google Search. In July 2026 the court dismissed the claims, some with leave to amend; Google amended and SerpApi has moved to dismiss again. Separately, a New York court let Reddit’s similar claims against SerpApi proceed in July 2026. Neither case is about YouTube.
Is SerpApi worth it compared with the official YouTube Data API?
Google’s API is free but quota-limited and doesn’t return full search pages with their shelves. SerpApi does, with no quota beyond your plan, but you pay for every call.