Get a Facebook Ad Library video ad transcript

Retrieves a transcript for a single Facebook Ad Library video ad. Uses Facebook-provided captions when available, otherwise transcribes the public video URL on demand. Ads without retrievable captions return a 404 RESOURCE_NOT_FOUND, and on-demand transcription can fail transiently (503): both outcomes are free; credits are only deducted when a transcript is returned. On-demand transcription covers videos up to 2 minutes (120 seconds); a longer ad with no captions returns 400 INVALID_REQUEST with error.details.reason: video_too_long, duration_seconds and max_seconds, also free.

get/facebook/adlibrary/ad/transcript

Request

Base URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1
URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/facebook/adlibrary/ad/transcript
Auth: API key in header x-api-key

Query parameters

idstring

Facebook Ad Library ad ID. Ad ids rotate as campaigns end, so take a current one from /v1/facebook/adlibrary/company/ads rather than reusing an old one. (one of: id, url; at least one required)

urlstring

Facebook Ad Library URL for the ad. A page URL is rejected with a 400 at 0 credits. (one of: id, url; at least one required)

Headers

Cache-Controlstring

Send no-cache to bypass the response cache and force a live fetch. Billed at the normal endpoint cost; the fresh result is written back to cache for the next caller. Only the no-cache directive triggers this. See the Response Schema guide for details.

Idempotency-Keystring

Optional UUID that makes the request safely retriable. The key is reserved atomically per account before billing. A concurrent retry receives 409 IDEMPOTENCY_IN_PROGRESS with a Retry-After of 1 second while the original is young, growing to a quarter of the time it has been running (at most 30); a crashed reservation expires after 5 minutes. A replay keeps the cached payload immutable except for billing metadata: credits_used becomes 0, idempotent_replay becomes true, and credits_remaining is refreshed to the current balance. A known current balance appears in both the body and X-Credits-Remaining header; no balance row resolves to 0. On a transient lookup failure, body credits_remaining is null and X-Credits-Remaining is omitted. Completed outcomes expire after 24 hours. If the claim store is unavailable, the request fails closed before billing. GET endpoints do not combine idempotent replay with Server-Sent Events: use Accept: application/json when sending this header. The unsupported key-plus-SSE combination is rejected before billing.

Response

Successful response

successboolean required

Whether the request succeeded

platformstring required

Platform name

endpointstring required

API endpoint path

credits_usedinteger required

Number of credits consumed

credits_remaininginteger nullable required

Current account balance, or null when this response could not establish one. Free cache hits always return null because they do not establish an authoritative post-request balance. An idempotency replay also returns null when its current-balance lookup fails. It is never a fabricated zero, so a zero here means the account really is empty. The authoritative reading is the one on a billed response, which comes straight from the deduction.

request_idstring required

Unique request identifier for support

cachedboolean required

Whether the response was served from cache

idempotent_replayboolean

True only when this response is an idempotency replay

Example response

{
  "success": true,
  "platform": "facebook",
  "endpoint": "/v1/facebook/adlibrary/ad/transcript",
  "credits_used": 1,
  "credits_remaining": 4999,
  "request_id": "req-abc123",
  "idempotent_replay": true,
  "meta": {
    "hint": {
      "code": "search_multi",
      "message": "You searched \"matcha\" on 3 platforms one call at a time; /v1/search/multi returns each platform's own search rows in one call at the same price per platform, and a platform with no rows is not charged.",
      "method": "GET",
      "path": "/v1/search/multi?query=matcha&platforms=instagram,tiktok,youtube"
    }
  }
}

Changes

No recorded changes to this operation across all 1 revision of this API.