Save YouTube Captions to Google Sheets with Apify (n8n)

Save YouTube captions directly to Google Sheets with Apify (n8n)

This n8n workflow fetches an existing YouTube video (or Shorts) caption track using Apify and appends one clean row per successful video to your Google Sheets—complete with the full caption text and useful metadata. If captions can’t be retrieved, the workflow routes failures to a separate branch so you don’t end up with blank transcript rows.

What this workflow does

• Manual start: You manually execute the workflow.

• Reads inputs: It takes the YouTube video URL, your Google Sheets spreadsheet URL, and the worksheet name.

• Fetch captions via Apify: The workflow runs Apify’s YouTube Transcript Scraper in a “retrieve existing captions” mode (not audio transcription) and waits for the Apify run to finish.

• Validates results: It reads the same run’s Dataset (including saved status records from failed actor runs) to confirm whether a transcript was retrieved successfully.

• Appends one row per success: For each successful video, it writes the video ID, title, URL, channel, caption language, automatic-caption flag, full fetched text, and extraction time to Google Sheets.

• Handles missing/blocked captions: Missing captions, unavailable languages, and blocked requests are sent to a separate status node instead of adding empty transcript entries.

Use cases

• Build a searchable transcript library in Google Sheets for YouTube content you manage.

• Maintain datasets for analytics (language, channel, captions availability, extraction time) using n8n + Apify.

• Automate caption harvesting workflows while keeping failures cleanly separated for later review.

Technical details

• Apify integration: Uses the verified n8n node (@apify/n8n-nodes-apify) to run the YouTube Transcript Scraper.

• Google Sheets: Writes rows to the destination spreadsheet (requires permission to edit).

• Workflow logic: Uses nodes such as if, set, and no op, plus helper/status handling.

• Worksheet requirement: Create a worksheet named Transcripts with headers including: Video ID, Video title, Video U… (as specified in the setup).