YouTube MCP Server
YouTube MCP server enabling AI agents to interact with YouTube content — searching videos, retrieving video metadata and transcripts, accessing channel information, fetching comments, and integrating YouTube's vast video library into agent-driven research, content analysis, and knowledge extraction workflows.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
API key restricted to YouTube scope. HTTPS. Store key in env var. Community MCP. ToS compliance.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
An agent needs to search YouTube and extract content from videos — particularly transcript extraction for knowledge retrieval from educational or informational content.
Avoid When
You need to download videos or access age-restricted/private content — YouTube API only provides metadata and public data.
Use Cases
- • Searching YouTube for videos on specific topics from research agents
- • Extracting transcripts from YouTube videos for content analysis agents
- • Retrieving video metadata and channel information from content discovery agents
- • Analyzing YouTube comments for sentiment analysis agents
- • Building video content recommendation workflows from media agents
- • Extracting knowledge from educational YouTube content for learning agents
Not For
- • Downloading YouTube videos (violates ToS; use YouTube Data API for metadata only)
- • Bilibili, Vimeo, or other video platforms (use their respective MCPs)
- • Bulk channel data harvesting (YouTube API quota limits apply)
Interface
Authentication
YouTube Data API v3 key required. Obtain from Google Cloud Console. Free tier: 10,000 quota units/day. Transcript access may use youtube-transcript-api (no auth needed for public videos).
Pricing
YouTube Data API has a generous free quota. Transcript extraction for public videos is free via youtube-transcript-api. Community MCP is free open source.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ YouTube API quota: search costs 100 units; 10,000/day free = only 100 searches/day
- ⚠ Transcript availability varies — not all videos have captions/transcripts
- ⚠ YouTube API key should be restricted to YouTube Data API scope only
- ⚠ Video IDs (not URLs) required for most operations — parse IDs from URLs first
- ⚠ Age-restricted and private videos inaccessible without OAuth2 user consent
- ⚠ Community MCP — YouTube Data API is well-documented by Google
Alternatives
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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-07.