How to Scrape YouTube Shorts in 2026 — Titles, Hashtags & Viral Score

#webscraping #youtube #automation #apify

Manually hunting for viral YouTube Shorts is a full-time job. You scroll, you screenshot, you paste into a spreadsheet — and by the time you're done, the trend has moved on.

This post shows you how to automate it with a free Apify actor that pulls titles, hashtags, view counts, engagement rates, and a computed viral score for any keyword in seconds.

What the Actor Scrapes

The YouTube Shorts Scraper extracts:

Titles from YouTube's internal reelItemRenderer (no proxy needed)
View count and engagement rate — (likes + comments) / views x 100
Viral Score — composite score weighting views, recency, and engagement
Hashtags — parsed directly from titles
Audio/music metadata — song name, artist, is_original_audio flag
Thumbnail URLs — full-resolution for every Short
Channel info — name and URL

Quick Start

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

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

const run = await client.actor('khadinakbar/youtube-shorts-scraper').call({
  searchQuery: 'morning routine tips',
  maxResults: 25,
});

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

Or run it on Apify Store — no code needed.

Example Output

{
  "video_id": "abc123XYZ",
  "title": "My 5AM Morning Routine Changed Everything",
  "channel_name": "MindsetDaily",
  "view_count": 2400000,
  "engagement_rate": 4.25,
  "viral_score": 91.3,
  "hashtags": ["#morningroutine", "#shorts"],
  "audio_track": "Lo-fi Morning",
  "is_original_audio": false
}

How It Works

YouTube blocks individual Shorts pages from cloud IPs without residential proxies. The actor solves this with a two-phase architecture:

Phase 1: Intercepts YouTube's internal search API response, which reliably returns title, thumbnail, and view count for every Short — even from cloud IPs.

Phase 2: Visits each Short's page to extract likes, comments, and audio. If the page is blocked, it gracefully falls back to Phase 1 data — you always get results.

MCP Integration

Available as an MCP tool for Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible AI assistant:

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=actors,docs,get-actor-run,get-actor-run-list,khadinakbar/youtube-shorts-scraper

Get Started

Run on Apify Store — free tier, no credit card required.

More scrapers: YouTube Email | Google Trends | Instagram Hashtags

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