Export YouTube Search Results for Competitor Research
Before you plan a video for a keyword, see who already owns it — and by how much.
Updated 26 September 2026 · 6 min readBefore you spend hours scripting, filming and editing a video, it's worth ten minutes finding out who you'd be competing against for the keyword you're targeting. The search page shows you that — but only as a page, gone the moment you close the tab. An export turns the same page into rows: something you can sort by view count, group by channel, and keep on file for the next time you plan content around that term.
This is the difference between guessing "there's probably competition for this" and actually knowing which three channels hold nine of the top ten spots, how recently they last posted on the topic, and roughly how many views separate the leader from the rest of the pack.
Why the export is a research step, not just a list
A search page answers one question — who's ranking right now. An export answers the ones that actually shape a content decision:
🏰Who owns the keyword
Group the export by channel to see whether one creator holds most of page one, or the field is genuinely open.
📈How big is 'winning' here
View counts across the ranking set tell you the ceiling for this keyword — and whether it's worth the production effort.
🗓️How active the competition is
Publish dates show whether competitors are freshly investing in the topic or the top results are years old.
🧭What angle is missing
Reading titles side by side surfaces the sub-topic nobody's covered yet — often the actual opportunity.
Export the SERP in 4 steps
Open the Search Results Export tool
Enter the keyword you're planning to target
Pick the country your audience is in
Export to CSV and open it in a spreadsheet
Save the file with a date in the name
Reading the export for competitive signal
Once you have the CSV, three sorts do most of the work:
| Sort or group by | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Channel | Whether one or two channels dominate the term, or results are spread across many — concentrated results are harder to break into. |
| View count, descending | The realistic ceiling for this keyword, and how far the #1 result is ahead of #2 through #10. |
| Publish date | Whether the top results are recent (an active, contested keyword) or old (possibly stale — an opening, or a sign interest has faded). |
Read the titles as a set, not one at a time. Recurring words and formats ("Full Guide", "in 2026", numbered lists) tell you what searchers respond to for this term — and what your own title needs to match or beat.
View count isn't the whole story
A worked example
Say you're planning a video for "how to edit vertical video". You export the keyword for your target country and get back the top results. Grouping by channel shows three different editing-software channels hold six of the top ten spots — each publishing on adjacent phrasing roughly every few weeks. Sorting by view count shows a wide gap between the top two results and the rest, suggesting those two are the ones to actually study, not the whole page.
Sorting by publish date shows the remaining four results are over a year old. That's your opening: a fresher video on the same keyword, aimed at the gap between what the two leaders cover and what a viewer searching that exact phrase still can't find.
How MyFreshTools helps
What the tool does
The YouTube Search Results Export takes a keyword and a country, runs the search through the YouTube API, and returns the ranked results as a downloadable CSV — position, title, channel, URL, view count and publish date for each result.
Who it's for
- Creators scoping out a keyword before committing to a video.
- SEO and content teams comparing competitive density across a list of candidate topics.
- Agencies building a competitor landscape for a client's channel strategy.
Requirements and limits
- A free MyFreshTools account, no card required.
- One credit per export, flat, regardless of how many rows come back.
- Free plan returns the top 5 results per keyword; paid plans return up to 100 results per keyword and country.
- Export format is CSV only — no Excel or JSON on this tool.
- Results are for the country you select at export time — the same keyword can look very different by region.
- An export is a snapshot at the moment you run it; for ongoing rank monitoring of a specific video, use the Video Rank Checker or Rank Tracker instead.
Frequently asked questions
Watching the page gives you an impression. An export gives you rows you can sort by views, group by channel and keep dated — which is what turns 'these videos look popular' into an actual comparison.
It varies by term. A narrow keyword is often dominated by two or three channels; a broad one usually spreads across many. The export is what tells you which situation you're in before you commit to a video.
It gives you the visible signals — title, view count, channel, publish date. It won't tell you watch time or click-through rate, since YouTube doesn't expose those for other people's videos. Title patterns and view scale are still strong proxies.
Yes — pick that country when you run the export. Results for the same keyword can look completely different by region, so check the country you're actually planning to target.
Export the same keyword again later and compare positions by video. For continuous tracking of a specific competitor video against a keyword, the Video Rank Checker or Rank Tracker are built for exactly that.
Yes — a free MyFreshTools account, which takes a few seconds and needs no card. Signup includes free credits and one export costs a flat 1 credit.
The takeaway
The videos ranking for your keyword today are the competition you'll actually be measured against. An export turns that page into something you can sort, group and compare — which is the ten minutes of research that decides whether a keyword is worth the video.