Can Grok Watch YouTube Videos? Give Grok YouTube Transcripts with MCP (2026)

We found no xAI page describing YouTube support in the Grok app, and xAI's Grok page refused our request, so we make no claim about what the app does with a pasted link. The xAI API is documented: its remote MCP tools guide says MCP tools work in "the xAI native SDK, the OpenAI compatible Responses API, and the Speech to Speech API", and that "only Streaming HTTP and SSE transports are supported".

An MCP server is a set of tools a model can call. Ours fetches a video's transcript, searches YouTube and lists a channel's or playlist's videos, over Streamable HTTP at https://getyoutubetranscript.com/api/mcp.

1. Paste the video link into our transcript generator and click Copy (no account needed).
2. Paste it into Grok with your request, such as "Summarize this in five points".

Create a key in your GetYouTubeTranscript dashboard (100 free credits, no card), put it in place of sk_live_..., and send this to the Responses API. Grok decides when to call the transcript tool:

curl https://api.x.ai/v1/responses \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $XAI_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "grok-4.7",
    "input": [{"role": "user", "content": "Summarize https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU"}],
    "tools": [{
      "type": "mcp",
      "server_label": "getyoutubetranscript",
      "server_url": "https://getyoutubetranscript.com/api/mcp",
      "headers": {"Authorization": "Bearer sk_live_..."}
    }]
  }'

The request shape (type, server_label, server_url, headers) follows xAI's guide; the model name is the one its examples use. Add "allowed_tools": ["get_youtube_transcript"] to limit Grok to transcripts. We checked the header format against our own server; we have not run this call against xAI ourselves.

The same server works in Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini CLI; the full list is on the YouTube MCP server page.