How to extract YouTube transcript in ChatGPT

YouTube does not offer a public transcript API, and its frontend loads captions dynamically through JavaScript. The Firecrawl MCP server gives ChatGPT reliable transcript extraction by handling JavaScript rendering and markup cleanup automatically.

Set it up in ChatGPT's MCP settings:

• Command: npx -y firecrawl-mcp
• Environment variable: FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=fc-YOUR_API_KEY

Then paste a YouTube URL and ask ChatGPT to extract the transcript. Firecrawl's scrape tool renders the page, locates the transcript content, and returns clean markdown. The full text appears in your chat, ready for follow-up questions — find specific quotes, rewrite the content as a blog post, translate key points, or cross-reference multiple videos.

If a video has no transcript available, Firecrawl still returns the title, description, and metadata so ChatGPT can provide context. For non-English videos, Firecrawl extracts whatever captions YouTube provides, and ChatGPT can translate from there.

MCP is an open standard, so the same Firecrawl server works with Claude, Cursor, and other compatible clients. Get a free API key at firecrawl.dev.