# Find and read YouTube videos on your topic with your AI agent

> Ask your agent which YouTube videos cover your topic, then have it read the ones that matter instead of watching them. Manifold searches YouTube and returns full transcripts, at 1 credit a search page and 1 a transcript. Our search for "claude code seo" over the past month returned 20 videos with 755,101 views, and one was a competitor's own tutorial, which the agent read in full.

| | |
| --- | --- |
| Job | The videos your buyers watch, read instead of watched |
| Tools | youtube_search_videos, youtube_get_transcript |
| Credits | 2: one search and one transcript |
| Returns | Title, views and length, then the full transcript |
| Run on | "claude code seo", past month, 26 October 2026 |

## The prompts

We asked our own agent, Claude Code connected to Manifold, on 26 October 2026:

```text
Find YouTube videos from the past month about Claude Code for SEO, and list them by views
with their length.
```

Then, after reading the list:

```text
Read the DataForSEO video and tell me what it shows, what you need to follow it and what it
says it costs.
```

## The calls

| Step | Tool | Input | Credits |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | [`youtube_search_videos`](https://www.manifoldmcp.com/docs/tools/youtube#youtube_search_videos) | "claude code seo", past month | 1 |
| 2 | [`youtube_get_transcript`](https://www.manifoldmcp.com/docs/tools/youtube#youtube_get_transcript) | DataForSEO's video | 1 |

The search returns YouTube's ranked results with each video's title, views and length. The transcript is the whole text of what the video says. This search returned no like counts or channel sizes; [`youtube_get_video`](https://www.manifoldmcp.com/docs/tools/youtube#youtube_get_video) and [`youtube_get_channel`](https://www.manifoldmcp.com/docs/tools/youtube#youtube_get_channel) read those for one video or channel.

## What came back

20 videos, with 755,101 views in all. The ten most viewed:

| Video | Views | Minutes |
| --- | ---: | ---: |
| [How the Top 1% Use Claude Code Differently](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9NQTYUP6k0) | 354,080 | 18 |
| [I Spent $21,455 & 1,200 Hours On Claude Code & Codex For This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OmpkvjhuyE) | 167,337 | 27 |
| [Claude Opus 5.5 Just Changed SEO Forever](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBLUw9JZ9jw) | 62,009 | 19 |
| [Claude Code Local SEO Agent: Automate Everything ($500K+ Earned)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwzV-YsVswA) | 38,447 | 34 |
| [Turn Claude skills into revenue](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I7-OvFQxBk) | 27,370 | 25 |
| [Claude Code Full Course 2026 : Everything You Need to Know (No Coding Needed)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVRjUvjDQwE) | 25,917 | 312 |
| [Claude Code Google Ads Agent: Automate Everything ($730K Earned)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2evmgrxIGQ) | 24,497 | 25 |
| [Marketing Engineering Crash Course with Claude Code](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOuxlampW9E) | 19,217 | 29 |
| [How To Connect Claude AI And Claude Code With Elementor MCP](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIwidu-UjIs) | 14,426 | 4 |
| [Claude Code mods + claude seo: a live SEO dashboard (free)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQm--J2bqSQ) | 6,371 | 9 |

DataForSEO's own video, [How to Build an SEO Content Plan with Claude Code + DataForSEO](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSZP45rQhco), had 719 views, 17th of the 20. From its transcript:

- **What it shows:** you give Claude a topic, seed keywords or a competitor's domain, and it builds a content plan: it widens the topic into a keyword list, scores each keyword's difficulty and intent, groups them into topics and writes a roadmap.
- **What you need:** a DataForSEO account, Claude Code, DataForSEO's MCP server connected, and its content plan skill, downloaded and copied into the Claude skills folder.
- **What it says it costs:** about 40 cents to build and score 1,000 keywords. The run in the video took about five and a half minutes and wrote a PDF, an Excel file and a JSON file.

## What the agent concluded

- **The biggest videos are about Claude Code, not SEO.** The two most viewed, with 354,080 and 167,337 views, are general Claude Code videos. 11 of the 20 titles name SEO.
- **A few channels post often.** Three channels posted three videos each in the month.
- **A data provider teaches the job itself.** DataForSEO shows the whole workflow on its own channel, with its own account, server and skill. Manifold's SEO tools run on DataForSEO's data too, without a DataForSEO account: one hosted connector with one credit balance for SEO, AI answers, social and leads.

## Run it on yours

Put your own topic in the same prompts:

```text
Find YouTube videos from the past {month or year} about {your topic}, and list them by views
with their length. Then read {the one that matters} and tell me what it shows.
```

Then read what viewers asked with [`youtube_get_comments`](https://www.manifoldmcp.com/docs/tools/youtube#youtube_get_comments), or list a channel's own videos with [`youtube_get_videos`](https://www.manifoldmcp.com/docs/tools/youtube#youtube_get_videos).

## Questions

### Do I need a YouTube API key?

No. There is no Google Cloud project, key or daily quota of yours to set up. YouTube's own Data API downloads captions only for videos you own; Manifold reads the transcript of any public video that has one.

### What if a video has no captions?

Then there is no transcript to read. The call returns no data and costs 1 credit, as every call that finds no data does.

### Can it read the comments?

Yes. The comments tool returns what viewers wrote under a video, at 1 credit a page.

### How exact are the dates?

Approximate. YouTube search shows an age such as 3 weeks ago, so a date is exact only to that unit.

## Next

- [YouTube MCP server](https://www.manifoldmcp.com/mcp/youtube)
- [YouTube tools in the docs](https://www.manifoldmcp.com/docs/tools/youtube)
- [DataForSEO MCP alternative](https://www.manifoldmcp.com/mcp/dataforseo)

## Sources

- [DataForSEO: How to Build an SEO Content Plan with Claude Code + DataForSEO (read 26 October 2026)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSZP45rQhco)

Published 22 October 2026. Updated 26 October 2026.