Can Perplexity Watch YouTube Videos? Add a YouTube Transcript Connector (2026)

Steps from Perplexity's custom remote connectors help article:

1. Open Plugins in the sidebar (or Customize, then Connectors).
2. Choose Add custom, then Add MCP connector, then Remote.
3. Name it GetYouTubeTranscript and set the MCP server URL to https://getyoutubetranscript.com/api/mcp.
4. Under Advanced, set Authentication to OAuth and Transport to Streamable HTTP.
5. Tick the acknowledgement and choose Add, then sign in when asked.

Why OAuth: our server needs Authorization: Bearer <key>, and Perplexity's form has no custom-header field and does not say how its API Key option sends the key. Our server publishes the standard OAuth discovery documents MCP clients use (we checked them live), the same sign-in Claude.ai and ChatGPT use. We could not test Perplexity's side ourselves. In an organization, an admin may first need to turn on custom connectors.

Paste a YouTube link and ask, for example, "Get the transcript of this video and list the main arguments with timestamps". Each transcript the connector fetches costs 1 credit from your GetYouTubeTranscript account; new accounts get 100 free, and failed calls cost nothing.

Paste the link into our transcript generator, click Copy (no account needed) and paste the text into Perplexity with your question.

Perplexity's Agent API takes remote MCP servers as tools; the server "must be a Streamable HTTP MCP endpoint", which ours is. With a key from your dashboard in place of sk_live_...:

curl https://api.perplexity.ai/v1/agent \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PERPLEXITY_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "openai/gpt-5.6-sol",
    "input": "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 model name is one from Perplexity's own example. We put the key in headers because Perplexity says to give its authorization field "the raw token value" without saying whether it adds "Bearer". We checked the header format against our server; we have not run this call against Perplexity ourselves. Local (command-line) MCP servers work only in Perplexity's Mac app.

Grok, Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini; every supported client is on the YouTube MCP server page.