Best YouTube Shorts scrapers: how to get Shorts data

November 8, 2026

Shorts are where many channels now grow fastest, but they are awkward to collect. The core problem: the official API does not tell you which videos are Shorts. This post covers how to identify them and which tools return them.

Why Shorts are hard to pull

The videos resource in the YouTube Data API has no property that marks a video as a Short. The only Shorts mention in that reference is about how views are counted. Google So if you list a channel's uploads, Shorts and long videos come back mixed together.

Duration alone is not enough either. YouTube says Shorts can be up to three minutes long for uploads on or after 15 October 2024, if the video is square or vertical. Earlier uploads over 60 seconds stay long-form. YouTube Help The search.list filter videoDuration=short means under four minutes, which is a different thing. source

Also note that YouTube changed how Shorts views count on 31 March 2025: a view now counts each time a Short starts or replays, with no minimum watch time. Compare Shorts views with Shorts, not with long-form views. revision history

A rule of thumb to classify Shorts from the official API

Get the duration from contentDetails.duration (ISO 8601, such as PT45S).
If it is over 180 seconds, it is not a Short.
If it was published before 15 October 2024 and is over 60 seconds, it is not a Short.
Otherwise you need the aspect ratio, which the API does not give you directly. Many people request https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID and check whether it stays on the Shorts URL. That is a heuristic, not a documented contract.

A tool that reads the channel's Shorts tab directly avoids the guesswork.

The options

Tool	Shorts support	Price
YouTube Data API	No Shorts flag; classify yourself	Free, 10,000 units a day
yt-dlp	Can read a channel's Shorts tab URL	Free
SerpApi	Returns a `shorts_results` block in search	From $25 a month
Bright Data	Video scrapers by channel, keyword and hashtag	$1.50 per 1,000 records
ScrapeIO	Dedicated Shorts and trending Shorts endpoints	1 credit a call

yt-dlp handles YouTube channel tabs, so pointing it at https://www.youtube.com/@handle/shorts with --flat-playlist -J lists Shorts quickly. It is free, but you run and update it. source

SerpApi includes a Shorts block in its YouTube search response, useful for "which Shorts rank for this keyword". source

Bright Data offers video scrapers that take a channel URL, keyword or hashtag. source

What to measure on Shorts

Views per day since upload, so new and old Shorts compare fairly.
Like rate: likes divided by views. With replays counted as views, this rate runs lower than on long videos.
Comment rate: comments divided by views. High comment rates usually mean a question or a strong opinion in the video.
Shorts share of channel views: sum of Shorts views over all views in the same window.

A weekly Shorts report in five steps

List the Shorts each channel you track published in the last 7 days.
Pull views, likes and comments for each, and the publish time.
Compute views per day and like rate, and rank the Shorts across all channels.
Tag the top 10 by hook type: question, list, before and after, reaction, tutorial.
Compare with last week. Hooks that rank twice in a row are worth testing.

Run the pull at the same time each week. Shorts can gain most of their views in the first days, so a fixed age window keeps the comparison fair.

Doing it with ScrapeIO

The YouTube channel Shorts API returns a channel's Shorts newest first with views and likes, so there is nothing to classify. The trending Shorts API shows what is trending now, and the YouTube video API gives full stats for one Short by URL.

curl "https://scrapeio.com/v1/youtube/channel/shorts?handle=@MrBeast" -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY"

Sources

Checked on 8 November 2026 from each vendor's own pages. Prices and limits change; follow the links before you decide.

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