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Axio Api
Axio Api

Posted on Originally published at axioapi.com

Extracting Hidden YouTube Video Tags with an API

#api #youtube #seo #javascript

YouTube removed visible tags from the watch page UI a while back, but creators and competitors still set them — they're just sitting in the page's <meta name="keywords"> tag and the embedded player JSON, invisible unless you view source. If you're doing competitive research on what tags a channel is targeting, you either inspect page source by hand or write a small scraper.

AxioAPI does the scraping and parsing for you and hands back structured JSON.

The endpoint 

GET https://axioapi.com/api/v1/social/youtube/videos/{id}/tags
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{id} is the 11-character YouTube video ID (the part after v= in a watch URL, or after youtu.be/).

const API = 'https://axioapi.com/api/v1';
const headers = { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.AXIOAPI_KEY}`, Accept: 'application/json' };

async function getTags(videoId) {
  const res = await fetch(`${API}/social/youtube/videos/${videoId}/tags`, { headers });
  if (!res.ok) throw new Error(`${res.status}: ${await res.text()}`);
  return (await res.json()).data;
}

getTags('dQw4w9WgXcQ').then(({ tags, title, view_count }) => {
  console.log(title, view_count);
  console.log(tags.join(', '));
});
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Response shape:

{
  "data": {
    "video_id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "title": "...",
    "description": "...",
    "view_count": 1000000000,
    "like_count": 12000000,
    "channel": "...",
    "tag_count": 14,
    "tags": ["rick astley", "never gonna give you up", "..."]
  }
}
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Not every video has tags — plenty of channels skip them entirely, in which case tags comes back empty and tag_count is 0.

Batch-checking a channel's recent uploads

If you're auditing tag usage across a channel, pair this with the video list you already have (from your own channel scrape or YouTube Data API) and fan out:

async function tagsForVideos(videoIds) {
  const results = await Promise.all(videoIds.map((id) => getTags(id).catch(() => null)));
  return videoIds.reduce((acc, id, i) => {
    acc[id] = results[i]?.tags ?? [];
    return acc;
  }, {});
}
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Keep the concurrency reasonable — this scrapes the real YouTube watch page per call, so hammering it with hundreds of parallel requests is more likely to get you rate-limited than a handful at a time with a short delay between batches.

Caching

Responses are cached server-side for 24 hours per video ID, so re-checking the same video repeatedly in one day doesn't cost extra. Current pricing is on the Social — YouTube API page.

Want to try it without writing code first? There's a free YouTube Tag Extractor tool — paste a video URL, get the tag list back.

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