YouTube Suggest API
YouTube autocomplete suggestions API — get real-time search completions for keyword research and search UI autocomplete. From $0.01/call.
Retrieve autocomplete and search suggestions from YouTube's suggestion engine. Type a partial query and get back the most popular completions — perfect for building search UIs or keyword research.
Try it live
Fill in the fields and hit Run to see a real response.
{
"ok": true,
"data": {
"query": "never gonna",
"suggestions": [
"never gonna give you up",
"never gonna give you up lyrics"
]
}
}Features
Send a partial query (e.g. 'never gonna') to /v1/youtube/suggest and get the live completions YouTube would show in its search box, as a suggestions array.
Completions come straight from YouTube's autocomplete, reflecting what people actually search rather than a static keyword list.
The endpoint returns just the query and an ordered suggestions array, making it light enough to call on every keystroke in a search UI.
Each completion is a real, popular query — mine them to find long-tail YouTube keywords and content ideas.
Use cases
Search UI
Power a YouTube-style autocomplete dropdown in your app's search bar.
Keyword Research
Discover popular search queries and long-tail keywords for YouTube SEO.
Content Ideation
Generate video topic ideas by exploring what people are searching for.
Quick start
Copy this snippet and start making calls.
const res = await fetch('https://api.yepapi.com/v1/youtube/suggest', {
method: 'POST',
headers: {
'x-api-key': 'YOUR_API_KEY',
'Content-Type': 'application/json',
},
body: JSON.stringify({
"query": "never gonna"
}),
});
const data = await res.json();
console.log(data);The YouTube Suggest API — live autocomplete and keyword ideas
The YouTube Suggest API returns YouTube's own search autocomplete. Send a partial query like 'never gonna' to /v1/youtube/suggest and get back an ordered suggestions array — 'never gonna give you up', 'never gonna give you up lyrics', and so on — the exact completions YouTube shows as users type. It's the lightest endpoint in the suite and the most useful for keyword work.
At $0.01 per call it's cheap enough to fire on every keystroke for a search-box UI, or to batch through a seed list for SEO research. Each suggestion is a real query with real search intent behind it.
What is a YouTube Suggest API?
A YouTube Suggest API returns the autocomplete completions YouTube proposes for a partial search query. You send a fragment like 'never gonna' and get back the original query plus an ordered suggestions array of popular completions. These aren't guesses — they come from YouTube's own suggestion engine and reflect what real users search, ranked by popularity. The response is deliberately minimal (query plus suggestions), which makes it fast enough to call on every keystroke. It's the endpoint for two jobs: powering a YouTube-style search dropdown, and harvesting real long-tail keywords for content and SEO research.
Build your own keyword research tool
Take a seed term and call Suggest on it, then call Suggest again on each returned completion, and recursively on those — a few levels deep and you've expanded one keyword into hundreds of real, popularity-ranked YouTube queries. Append each letter of the alphabet to your seed ('seed a', 'seed b', ...) to broaden the harvest. Feed the resulting keyword list into the Search endpoint sorted by view_count to find the top video for every query — that's a full content-gap analysis built from two endpoints. Or just wire Suggest into your app's search box for instant, authentic autocomplete.
YouTube Suggest API pricing — $0.01/call
Each autocomplete lookup costs $0.01 and returns the full suggestions array. Because it's so light, it's affordable to call frequently — even on each keystroke in a live search box, where debouncing keeps the count reasonable. There's no daily quota. The official Data API has no autocomplete endpoint, so this is the way to access YouTube's real suggestion data, and at a flat cent per call it scales cleanly from a single search box to a bulk keyword crawl.
Suggest as the front door to keyword strategy
Suggest is where a YouTube SEO workflow begins: it tells you what people type. Pair it with Search to see who currently ranks for each suggestion, with Hashtag to gauge how much tagged content exists, and with Trending to spot which suggested topics are surging. The cheap, fast Suggest call seeds all of it. Every endpoint shares one YepAPI key, so a single keyword-research tool can lean on the whole YouTube suite — plus the SEO and AI endpoints — without juggling credentials.
Try the YouTube Suggest API free
Get $5 of free credit at signup, no card required — that's 500 autocomplete lookups. Seed a few terms and crawl their completions to see how fast Suggest expands a keyword list before you build.
Start making API calls in 30 seconds
$5 free credit on signup. No credit card required. Pay per call.
What developers say
“Switched from SerpAPI and cut our SERP costs by 80%. Same data quality, way simpler billing.”
“One API key for AI models, SERP data, and web scraping. Saved us from managing 4 separate providers.”
“The $5 free credit let us prototype our entire rank tracking feature before committing. No other API does that.”
Frequently asked questions
Retrieve autocomplete and search suggestions from YouTube's suggestion engine. Type a partial query and get back the most popular completions — perfect for building search UIs or keyword research.
Each API call costs $0.01. No monthly minimums or subscriptions — you only pay for what you use.
Sign up for a free API key, then send a POST request to /v1/youtube/suggest. Check the code example above for a ready-to-use snippet in JavaScript, cURL, or Python.
YepAPI bundles SEO, AI, and web scraping APIs under one key with no monthly minimums. You get lower per-call pricing, a unified dashboard, and one billing account instead of managing multiple providers.
Ready to integrate?
Get your API key and start making calls in 30 seconds. $5 free credit on signup — no credit card required.
More youtube api endpoints
Search
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Video Details
$0.02Full YouTube video metadata — title, views, likes, description, keywords, thumbnails, and available formats. Video intelligence from $0.02/call.
Comments
$0.01YouTube comments API — fetch top-level comments and replies with author info, likes, and timestamps. Sentiment analysis and engagement research from $0.01/call.