YouTube search results with views and duration in one row
You want YouTube search results inside a script, a spreadsheet, n8n or an AI agent: which videos rank for a keyword, their views, age, duration and channel. Here is what the official API allows, and what PlainRows offers.
The official YouTube Data API and its limits
- Daily quota: on 2026-10-08 Google wrote that "Projects that enable the YouTube Data API have a default quota allocation of
100
search.listcalls, 100videos.insertcalls, and 10,000 units per day combined for all other endpoints". More quota goes through the "Quota extension request form for YouTube API Services" (developers.google.com/youtube/v3/getting-started). - Results per call:
search.listacceptsmaxResultsfrom 0 to 50, default 5 (developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/search/list). With the default quota, that is at most 5,000 search results a day. - No views or duration in search results: a search returns the
snippetpart only (title, channel, description, date). View counts and durations need a second call tovideos.listfor the video IDs. - Setup: a Google Cloud project, the API enabled and an API key before the first call.
What PlainRows charges
No subscription to us and no API key. The tool runs on Apify: the free Apify plan is enough to test it, and the Starter plan ($19 per month, with $19 of usage included, apify.com/pricing) removes the free-plan limits.
| Data | Tool | Price (Starter plan) |
|---|---|---|
| YouTube search results for up to 1,000 queries per run, up to about 200 videos per query, in 20 countries: title, URL, views, upload age and approximate date, duration, channel name, ID and URL, Shorts and live flags, badges, position. YouTube filters for sort, upload date and duration. | YouTube Search Scraper API | $0.0015 per video returned; queries with no result, channels, playlists and repeated videos are free |
Example: tracking the top 50 videos for 20 keywords once a week is about 4,000 videos a month, about $6.00.
When the official API is the better choice
- 100 searches a day of up to 50 videos are enough for you: within its quota the official API is free.
- You need data only the API gives: full descriptions, tags, likes, comment counts, captions, or anything on your own channel.
- You need exact upload timestamps. PlainRows gives the age YouTube shows ("2 years ago") and an approximate date computed from it.
When PlainRows is the better choice
- You run more searches than the default quota allows, or you do not want to set up a Google Cloud project.
- You want views, duration and channel in the same row as the search position, without a second API call.
- You want results as a viewer in a given country sees them, with Shorts and live streams flagged or filtered out.
- You run it from n8n, Make, Zapier, Google Sheets or an AI agent (MCP), with a hard cap: every run stops at the maximum cost you set.
Competitor facts checked on 2026-10-08 from the linked pages; prices change, check them before you decide.