Advanced YouTube video search

Search query.

Sort order: date, rating, relevance (default), title, videoCount, viewCount. order=date is exact (measured: zero inversions against the timestamps). order=viewCount is YouTube's popularity-weighted ranking: the top result is the true maximum but mid-list order is approximate, so for exact ranking add includeExtras=true and sort the page on engagement.views client-side. Both are far more faithful than /v1/youtube/search's sortBy=popular, which is not view-ordered at all.

Video length: short (<4m), medium (4-20m), long (>20m), any. Genuinely applied (unlike /v1/youtube/search's duration, which the upstream ignores). short plus a client-side post.content.duration_seconds <= 180 filter is the documented Shorts approximation: see the endpoint description for why it is an approximation and not a Shorts filter.

Broadcast type: live, upcoming, completed.

License filter: creativeCommon, youtube, any.

YouTube video category id (e.g. 10 = Music).

ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code.

Preferred result language (ISO 639-1).

RFC-3339 datetime lower bound (e.g. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z). Exact and genuinely applied. This is the endpoint to use for date-window work.

RFC-3339 datetime upper bound. Exact and genuinely applied.

Restrict results to a single channel id.

Maximum number of videos to return (1-50). Honored exactly: a page of 50 returns 50 (live-verified).

Pagination cursor from a previous response: fetches the next page.

Safe-search filter: none, moderate, strict.

Caption filter: any, closedCaption, none.

Quality filter: any, high, standard.

Dimension filter: 2d, 3d, any.

Restrict to embeddable videos: true, any.

Type filter: any, episode, movie.

Restrict to a Freebase topic id (e.g. /m/04rlf for music).

Latitude,longitude center for a geo search (e.g. 37.42307,-122.08427). Must be used together with location_radius.

Radius around location with a unit suffix (e.g. 50km, 10mi). Must be used together with location.

Set to true to add the view, like and comment counts (post.engagement.views / .likes / .comments) and the video length (post.content.duration_seconds) to every result. Left off, those four are null. YouTube's search index returns snippets only, so the counts come from a second lookup. Costs +5 credits per page (a page is at most 50 results, so it is a flat +5, not per result) and adds one upstream round-trip. If that lookup fails the page still returns, un-hydrated, with the +5 refunded and _warnings: ["extras_unavailable"] on the response.

Set to channel (one token only) to add each row's channel stats in this one call. channel puts the channel's subscriber count on post.ext.author_followers (YouTube's own figure, which it rounds to three significant figures above 1,000) and fills the channel's post.author.display_name, .avatar_url and .username where missing. Each join costs 1 credit per distinct video or channel it filled, and never more than 5 per 50; ids that could not be filled are refunded. Each join adds 0.2 to 0.7 seconds on a fresh page (one lookup per 50 ids, never more than 8 seconds). Read data.hydration for the rows, lookups, credits held and kept, and the time.

Only rows published on or after this date: YYYY-MM-DD (midnight UTC) or an ISO 8601 timestamp. Rows older than it are left off each page. This list is not in date order, so the walk does not stop at the date: keep following next_cursor, and each page costs what a page costs even when every row on it is filtered out. A row with no date is kept. published_after, start_date, from_date, publish_time (yesterday, this-week, this-month, last-3-months, last-6-months) and max_age_days are accepted and applied as since.

Only rows published on or before this date: YYYY-MM-DD (that whole UTC day is included) or an ISO 8601 timestamp. Newer rows are left off each page and the walk does not stop, so older pages follow. A row with no date is kept. published_before, end_date and to_date are accepted and applied as until.

Keep only rows with at least this many views (post.engagement.views). A row whose view count is unknown is discarded, so every returned row meets the floor. Filtering runs on our side after each page is fetched, so every page walked is billed as usual; data.walk.discarded counts what was removed and why.

Keep only rows published within this many days (post.published_at), 1 to 3650. A row with no date is discarded. Filtering runs on our side after each page is fetched, so every page walked is billed as usual; data.walk.discarded counts what was removed and why.

views: return the kept rows ordered by view count, highest first, across every page walked. Rows without a view count go last.

1 to 5 (default 1). Walk up to this many pages in one call and return the rows from all of them (after any filter). Each page walked is billed exactly as one call to this endpoint (a cached page is free) and counts against your rate limit. The walk stops early at the last page, or when the request's time budget runs low; data.walk.stopped says why (end, max_pages, time_budget, page_error) and data.next_cursor continues from where it stopped.

An id you choose (1 to 64 letters, digits, ., _ or -). Rows your account already received under the same seen id are removed from the page, and the page price falls with the share of repeats: page credits x new rows / rows on the page, rounded up, so a page of nothing but repeats is free. Only the page's own price is discounted: credits for joined data (include=) are charged only for rows you have not received, and are never discounted. The memory lasts 24 hours from the last call that used the id, holds row ids only, and is private to your account. Use one id across a set of related searches; data.walk.repeats counts what was removed.

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.

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.