Extract YouTube Transcripts in Bulk with Apify & Google Sheets

Extract YouTube Transcripts in Bulk and Log Them to Google Sheets (Apify + n8n)

Stop copy-pasting transcripts one video at a time. This n8n workflow pulls YouTube video transcripts in bulk using the Apify YouTube Transcript Scraper, filters out videos without captions, and appends one clean row per video into Google Sheets—including metadata, transcript text, and run totals.

What this workflow does

• Runs manually when you trigger it in n8n.
• Reads your inputs: a comma-separated list of YouTube URLs plus caption preferences (language and whether to use human vs auto-generated captions).
• Requests transcript results from Apify by using your Apify personal API token (HTTP Bearer Auth).
• Filters out videos that don’t have an available transcript.
• Formats each result into a consistent row with video metadata and the full transcript text.
• Appends rows to a selected Google Sheets tab and generates run totals such as total word count and average duration.

Use cases

• Build a spreadsheet of transcripts for a content library, podcast repurposing, or SEO research.
• Standardize caption language across many videos and quickly compare human vs auto-generated transcripts.
• Review transcript quality and analyze volume metrics (e.g., word count and duration) across runs.
• Give SaaS teams and automation engineers an easy “transcripts to data” pipeline without custom scraping code.

Technical details

• Apify integration: Apify YouTube Transcript Scraper via HTTP Request with Bearer Auth.
• Google Sheets: OAuth connection; writes to a chosen spreadsheet + sheet tab.
• n8n nodes used: set, filter, summarize, sticky note, http request, google sheets.

Setup tip: Ensure your Google Sheet headers match the output fields (Title, Channel, Video URL, Duration (min), Views, Language, Auto-Generated, Word Count, Tags, Description, Transcript) and update the CONFIG values (video URLs and language) before running.