Reverse-Engineering YouTube's InnerTube Search API (WEB Client + Continuations)

YouTube search in a browser loads HTML. YouTube search as a client sends JSON.

Same query, two paths. The HTML path costs a browser, a consent click, and 2 GB of RAM. The JSON path costs one fetch. I picked the second.

This is the shape of YouTube's InnerTube search from the WEB client side — what it sends, what it returns, how it pages — and where I stopped so this stays a tour, not a recipe.

The actor is live: primesieve/youtube-search-scraper — keywords in, normalized videos out, 20 per page, fetch-clean.

Reverse-Engineering YouTube's InnerTube Search API (WEB Client + Continuations)

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