5 things most developers get wrong about YouTube data: (We've processed 15M+ transcripts/month. Some of these surprised us too.)

Wrong: "YouTube doesn't have an API for transcripts." It doesn't have a PUBLIC one. But transcripts exist for nearly every video including auto-generated ones. ~94% of videos have extractable transcripts. The data is there. The access layer was missing.

Wrong: "Auto-generated captions are garbage." That was true in 2019. Post-2022, YouTube's speech recognition is remarkably accurate. We've processed millions of auto-generated transcripts. Error rates are low enough for RAG, search, and summarization at scale.