youtube-mcp-server

Provides an MCP server for querying YouTube data (e.g., search channels and fetch channel metadata/stats) using two transports: stdio for local use and a remote SSE-based transport exposed over HTTP.

Evaluated Mar 30, 2026 (21d ago)

Homepage ↗ Repo ↗ Ai Ml mcp model-context-protocol youtube typescript stdio sse github-copilot api-integration

⚙ Agent Friendliness

/ 100

Can an agent use this?

🔒 Security

/ 100

Is it safe for agents?

⚡ Reliability

/ 100

Does it work consistently?

Score Breakdown

⚙ Agent Friendliness

MCP Quality

Documentation

Error Messages

Auth Simplicity

Rate Limits

🔒 Security

TLS Enforcement

Auth Strength

Scope Granularity

Dep. Hygiene

Secret Handling

Uses an environment variable (.env) for the YouTube API key (positive signal), but no mention of securing the remote MCP SSE endpoint (e.g., authentication/authorization) is provided. Operational safety around quota/rate limiting is not documented.

⚡ Reliability

Uptime/SLA

Version Stability

Breaking Changes

Error Recovery

Best When

You want a simple MCP-enabled TypeScript server that bridges an LLM (via MCP) to the YouTube Data API v3 for interactive lookups.

Avoid When

You need strict compliance guarantees, advanced access control, or well-documented operational behaviors (error codes, retries, rate-limit handling) to run unattended workloads.

Use Cases

• Search for YouTube channels by name/handle
• Fetch channel metadata and statistics for analysis or research
• Use MCP tooling (e.g., GitHub Copilot Chat) to call YouTube lookup functionality from an LLM-powered workflow

Not For

• High-volume/enterprise YouTube scraping at scale without rate-limit/backoff strategy
• Use cases requiring first-class webhooks, job queues, or persistent storage
• Production deployments that require documented SLAs, detailed error semantics, and comprehensive security controls beyond an API key

Interface

REST API

Yes

GraphQL

gRPC

MCP Server

Yes ↗

SDK

Webhooks

Authentication

Methods: YouTube API key via environment variable (YOUTUBE_API_KEY)

OAuth: No Scopes: No

Authentication appears to be limited to providing a YouTube Data API key; no additional MCP client auth is described for securing the remote SSE endpoint.

Pricing

Free tier: No

Requires CC: No

Costs primarily depend on YouTube Data API usage (API quota/billing). The repository does not describe any provider pricing.

Agent Metadata

Pagination

none

Idempotent

False

Retry Guidance

Not documented

Known Gotchas

⚠ Remote transport is described as SSE over HTTP on localhost; production exposure would require additional hardening not covered in the README.
⚠ YouTube API quotas/rate limits are not described; agents may need their own backoff strategy.
⚠ Only one example tool name (get_youtube_channel) is mentioned; full tool surface area and input validation behavior are not exhaustively documented in the provided README.

Alternatives

Direct use of the YouTube Data API v3 with your own backend Other community MCP servers for YouTube/Google APIs (if available) Build a small MCP server yourself using @modelcontextprotocol/sdk and a YouTube API client

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API endpoint ↗ Agent guide ↗ Report inaccuracy

Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-30.