Stats, native captions, storyboard, and views/day velocity for any YouTube Short, plus open keyword discovery with no key or proxy. The most open short-form platform, returned as clean JSON.
@livia.rae
is this my most-viewed video yet? 👀
Not a mockup. These rows come from the same discovery engine the API serves, ranked by age-normalized views/day. The feed currently represents 14.8B views across 1114 breakouts with 96 heating signals and 548 sounds captured across 3 platforms.
Snapshot captured 5m ago.
A view count tells you what already won. It can’t tell you the hook that made people stay, how fast a video is accelerating right now, or whether its format still has runway. viralcli returns all of it: per video, tracked over time, as a dataset you can build on.
Paste a YouTube Shorts URL and get back the stats, caption, hook transcript, storyboard, and views/day velocity as a single structured object. Not five scrapes to stitch.
Views divided by age, so a 2-day breakout and a 2-month evergreen are finally comparable. The number that means “going viral now.”
The opening line as text and the visual beats as one image, so you read why a video worked instead of guessing from a thumbnail.
Give a keyword, get the breakout YouTube Shortsvideos ranked by velocity, plus the format’s adoption curve and a one-word read: heating, steady, or saturating. Each topic carries its seasonal position from five years of demand history.
Freshest posts are outrunning older ones. The format still has runway.
One scrape tells you where a video stands. Keep watching and you get the truth: how fast it’s accelerating, whether it’s peaking, and a history no one else has. viralcli tracks any video or keyword and pushes events over the same API your agents already call.
Track a video or keyword and the watcher polls it on an adaptive cadence, fast while it accelerates, slow once cold, then pushes a signed webhook the moment velocity crosses your threshold or the video peaks. No dashboard to babysit.
Every snapshot lands in a longitudinal store: hot for live reads, Parquet for history, and exportable. The view counts you capture today become time-series trend history no official API can backfill tomorrow.
The same call shape works on every platform we cover, so an agent written for one is already written for all of them.
One command, or one HTTP request, returns the whole record as JSON, then keeps watching it over time. Same shape on TikTok, Reels, and Shorts, so the code you write once runs everywhere.
# 1 · Analyze any short-form video — CLI or REST, same JSON
$ viralcli analyze "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1AUResPZt8I"
{
"platform": "youtube",
"views": 2840000,
"age_days": 3.1,
"views_per_day": 916129, # age-normalized velocity
"transcript": "you've been doing this wrong your whole life",
"transcript_kind": "hook", # the opening seconds, as text
"storyboard": "https://cdn.viralcli.com/sb/shorts_7361234.jpg",
"creator": "@user"
}
# 2 · Discover breakouts for a keyword — heating or saturating?
$ curl -s -X POST https://api.viralcli.com/v1/discovery \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VIRALCLI_KEY" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"seed":"budget meal prep"}'
# {"verdict":"HEATING","breakouts":[{…,"sound":"…"}],"adoption_histogram":[…]}
# 3 · Track it over time — true velocity, acceleration, peaking
$ viralcli track <url> --webhook https://you.dev/hooks
# POST on breakout:
# {"event":"breakout","true_vpd":124000,"accel":18000}YouTube Shorts is the most open short-form platform — no token, no proxy, and real captions you can read instead of transcribe. viralcli turns that openness into a clean data API: stats and velocity per Short, plus keyword discovery and breakout detection that just work.
One request returns views, likes, comments, the channel, and YouTube's native captions for any Short — no speech-to-text required — plus a storyboard and views/day velocity. It's the cleanest short-form data of the three platforms, with the least to break.
Unlike TikTok and Reels, Shorts discovery is genuinely open: hand the API a keyword and get back the breakout Shorts ranked by velocity, with no API key, no proxy, and no quota to ration. It's the path most teams start on because it scales without anti-bot friction.
A single discovery scrape reconstructs the format's adoption histogram and flags it heating, steady, or saturating — so you know whether a Shorts trend has runway. Wire breakout webhooks to be pinged when a Short's velocity crosses your threshold and act while it's still climbing.
Paste a link, get the signal.
For solo builders and side projects.
For tools and agents in production.
Pipeline-grade volume + the dataset.
For any Short URL: views, likes, comments, channel, YouTube's native captions, a storyboard of the visual beats, the Short's age, and views/day velocity. For a keyword: a ranked list of breakout Shorts plus an adoption histogram and a heating/saturating verdict — all with no API key or proxy, since Shorts discovery is open.
Free to start, no card. Analyze, track, and export short-form video data: one key, clean JSON.