Wattpad Scraper - Stories, Chapters, Authors & Comments

Wattpad Story, Chapter and Comment Scraper

Pull structured records out of Wattpad, the social storytelling platform. Search the site's own story index by keyword, category, language and completion state, or paste story and chapter links you already have. Every story comes back with its author, blurb, cover, tags, categories, language, read, vote and comment counters, and its full chapter list. Switch on the extras and each story also brings the body text of every chapter, split into the site's own numbered paragraphs, and the whole comment thread: end-of-chapter comments and inline comments written against one specific paragraph, each one matched back to the paragraph it belongs to.

Everything here comes from what Wattpad shows any anonymous visitor. There is no login, no account, no sign up and no credential of any kind anywhere in this actor.

Why This Scraper?

• Inline paragraph comments, matched to their paragraph. Wattpad's most distinctive data is the comment a reader leaves on one line of one chapter. This actor returns those, each carrying the id of the paragraph it was written on, so a comment can be placed next to the sentence that caused it. Comments left at the end of a chapter come back in the same pass and are labelled separately.
• One row per story, chapters and comments nested inside. A run that reads ten stories and forty thousand comments exports ten rows, so the dataset stays joinable and you are billed for stories, not for comments.
• The chapter list costs nothing. Every chapter's id, title, link, length, publish stamp and its own read, vote and comment counters arrive inside the story record. Only the chapter body text and the comment thread need extra requests, and a story that takes them is billed one detail-enrichment event once, however many chapters or comment pages it needed.
• Honest filters. The site's index accepts a tag parameter and a maturity parameter and then ignores both, which is easy to mistake for a working filter. This actor applies those two itself, over the data the site returns, and says so in the input rather than handing back an unfiltered set that looks filtered.
• Real end-of-feed detection. The comment feed signals "no more pages" by dropping a key, not by returning an empty list, and a missing comment list means a refused request rather than a quiet thread. Those two cases are told apart, so a blocked request never masquerades as a story with no comments.
• "No results" is checked before it is reported. A search that returns nothing on its first page looks exactly like a search the site briefly declined to answer: same status, same empty body. Before a run reports an empty result set, it spends one small check read that the site always answers. If that check comes back with results, your search really is empty and the run succeeds quietly. If it does not, the run reports a connection problem instead of handing you a successful run with zero rows.
• Recurring monitoring built in. Incremental mode returns only what changed since the last run of the same search, and resume continues one interrupted pull without paying for rows you already have.

Use Cases

• Fanfiction and reader community research: track tag, category and completion-state trends across genres to see which themes and pairings are growing.
• Content licensing and translation scouting: watch a language, category or tag for newly completed stories worth optioning, without reading the whole index by hand.
• Reader engagement studies: pull the full comment thread, inline and end-of-chapter together, to see exactly where in a story readers react.
• Discovery and recommendation tools: build genre or tag based reading lists straight from the site's own categories and tags.
• Portfolio and rival monitoring for authors: run incremental mode on a story link to see new chapters, retitles and completion-state changes over time, without re-reading engagement counters that move on their own.
• Moderation and brand-safety screening: check a story's mature flag and tags before referencing it in another product.

Data You Get

Sample shape, values are illustrative placeholders, not from a live story.

Field	Example
storyId	"100000001"
title	"The Sample Werewolf Chronicles"
url	"https://www.wattpad.com/story/100000001-the-sample-werewolf-chronicles"
description	"A one paragraph blurb, exactly as the author wrote it."
coverUrl	"https://img.example-cdn.test/cover/100000001-256.jpg"
author	"sample_author"
authorUrl	"https://www.wattpad.com/user/sample_author"
language	"English"
categories	["Werewolf"]
tags	["werewolf", "alpha", "mates"]
isCompleted	true
isMature	false
numParts	44
readCount	1234567
voteCount	89012
commentCount	34567
wordCount	412345
chapters	[{"chapterId": "200000001", "title": "Chapter 1", "commentCount": 876}]
chaptersReturned	44
comments	[{"scope": "inline", "paragraphId": "5a1b2c3d", "text": "This line broke me."}]
commentsReturned	50
commentsComplete	false
scanComplete	true
changeType	"NEW"

Comments, and what a comment row carries

Wattpad publishes two kinds of comment and this actor returns both from a single walk of each chapter:

• Inline comments are written against one paragraph. Their scope is "inline" and they carry a paragraphId that matches the id of an entry in that chapter's paragraphs list, so with chapter text switched on you can put the comment next to the exact sentence it answers.
• End-of-chapter comments sit under the chapter as a whole. Their scope is "part" and their paragraphId is null.

Every comment row carries the commenter's public display handle and profile address, the body text, the created and modified stamps, the site's own status value, its reply count and its permalink. replies is filled only when includeReplies is on. One thing is deliberately left out: the commenter's avatar image. A reader's photograph adds nothing to what they wrote, and republishing it at scale is a different product from publishing the comment. The same applies to the author's avatar on the story row.

commentCount on the story is the total the site itself declares and is usually far larger than commentsReturned. commentsComplete tells you whether the thread was read to its end or stopped at maxCommentsPerStory. Raise the cap to walk further; maxCommentsPerStory accepts up to 10,000 and maxRepliesPerComment up to 1,000, so a single run cannot walk an unbounded thread.

Known limits of the public index

These are the site's own behaviours, measured rather than assumed. None of them is a reason to log in, and this actor never does.

• Mature-flagged stories are not returned by the public search index. Anonymous search results come back with the mature flag false across the board, including on queries that plainly should surface mature work. Use URL mode for a mature story you already know: fetching a story by its own link or id works regardless of its flag.
• The advertised result total is not a stop condition, and search stops at result 10,000. A keyword search can advertise hundreds of thousands of matches and still stop serving rows a little past result 10,000. Category listings and the default listing advertise a flat 1,500. The run bounds on an empty page instead of the advertised total, reports any scope that was cut short, and refuses to expire anything from an incomplete scan.
• Search pages are not perfectly stable. Two neighbouring pages of the same search can overlap. Stories are deduplicated by id across the whole walk.
• The index ignores its own tag and maturity parameters. A tag that does not exist returns exactly the same rows as a real one, which is why tags and mature are applied by this actor after each story is read. A run with either set reads more stories than it returns, and maxItems counts what is returned.
• Requesting an unsupported field returns the record without it, and without an error. The actor only asks for fields the site documents on each surface, so a missing value always means the site had no value, never that the request was malformed.

Output views

The dataset has four views in the Console: Stories, chapters and comments (one row per story), Chapters only, Comments only (one line per comment, inline and end-of-chapter) and Changes (incremental mode), which lists changeType and changedFields. Comment volume per story is bounded by maxCommentsPerStory (default 20, at most 10,000) and maxRepliesPerComment (default 5, at most 1,000).

Filters, sorting and author mode

• Author names or profile links returns the published stories of each author; Start URLs are ignored while it is set.
• Access (free or paywalled), Minimum votes and Minimum reads are applied by the actor, because the source does not narrow on them. Votes and reads are checked against the counters on each story. Access is checked against the paid-story flag, which the actor reads on every story it collects; a story whose flag could not be read matches neither value. A strict value walks more result pages before it fills Max results.
• Sort by (votes, reads, comments, recently updated) in search mode ranks the first few hundred candidates the actor reads, highest first, and keeps the top Max results. The source has no sort control, so a ranked run that was cut to Max results counts as a partial scan and never expires stories in incremental mode. In URL and author mode only the first Max results stories collected are reordered; the actor does not read further stories to rank them.
• Add author profile adds an authorProfile block (display name, bio, location, website) with one extra public profile read per distinct author. It uses no extra billing event. Profile images and contact details are not returned.
• Every row also carries authorDisplayName, accessStatus, lastPublishedAt, discoveryInput (the input that found it) and, per chapter, position. accessStatus is paywalled or free from the paid-story flag the source publishes, and null when the flag could not be read; chapters carry no access flag of their own.

URL mode: supported link shapes

Behaviour change: URL mode run with the links field untouched now scrapes one example of each shape below instead of a single story. Replace the list to scrape only your own links. Search mode ignores the field.

Link shape	Example	Returns
Story	https://www.wattpad.com/story/12702726-werewolf-committee	That story
Story, id only	https://www.wattpad.com/story/12702726	That story
Story with /parts suffix	https://www.wattpad.com/story/12702726-werewolf-committee/parts	That story
Chapter	https://www.wattpad.com/39056066-werewolf-committee	The story the chapter belongs to
Chapter, id only	https://www.wattpad.com/39056066	The story the chapter belongs to
Keyword search	https://www.wattpad.com/search/werewolf	Every matching story, up to Max results
Search, one page	https://www.wattpad.com/search/werewolf?page=2	That page only (partial scan)
Search, completed only	https://www.wattpad.com/search/werewolf?filter=complete	Finished stories only
Search, language	https://www.wattpad.com/search/werewolf?language=1	One language, by the site's numeric id
Tag or category listing	https://www.wattpad.com/stories/werewolf	The category (or, if there is none of that name, the tag)
Named category listing	https://www.wattpad.com/stories/romance	The category
Listing, one page	https://www.wattpad.com/stories/werewolf?page=2	That page only (partial scan)
Listing with sort	https://www.wattpad.com/stories/werewolf?sort=hot	The feed's own order; a warning says the sort is not offered
Author	https://www.wattpad.com/user/Wattpad	The author's stories
Public story link	https://www.wattpad.com/api/v3/stories/12702726	That story
Public search link	https://www.wattpad.com/api/v3/stories?query=werewolf&limit=2&offset=2	That page only (partial scan)

The mobile host (m.wattpad.com) and reading lists (/list/...) are not supported: each logs a warning naming the link, never a silent empty result. A page, offset or limit link reads one page and incremental mode never expires stories from a scan that stopped there.

How to Use

1. Pick a mode: search (walk the story index by keyword, category, language and completion state) or url (paste story links, chapter links or numeric story ids).
2. Fill in the fields for that mode, and switch on chapter text, comments or replies only if you need them.
3. Set Max results to control run size and cost, then click Start.
4. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it through the API.

Search the index, chapter list included, no extra requests per story:

{
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "werewolf",
  "filter": "complete",
  "maxItems": 100
}

A category in one language, with the comment thread:

{
  "mode": "search",
  "category": "Horror",
  "language": "Spanish",
  "fetchComments": true,
  "commentScope": "inline",
  "maxCommentsPerStory": 200,
  "maxItems": 25
}

Pasted links, with the full chapter text and the replies under each comment:

{
  "mode": "url",
  "startUrls": [
    "https://www.wattpad.com/story/12702726-werewolf-committee"
  ],
  "fetchChapterText": true,
  "fetchComments": true,
  "includeReplies": true,
  "maxRepliesPerComment": 10
}

Daily monitoring of one search, returning only what changed:

{
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "enemies to lovers",
  "tags": ["slowburn"],
  "incrementalMode": true,
  "stateKey": "slowburn-watch",
  "maxItems": 0
}

Run it from your code

Python:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("abotapi/wattpad-scraper").call(run_input={"mode": "search", "query": "werewolf", "maxItems": 10})
for story in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(story["title"], story["author"], story["numParts"])

JavaScript:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>' });
const run = await client.actor('abotapi/wattpad-scraper').call({ mode: 'search', query: 'werewolf', maxItems: 10 });
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

Or connect it to Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets or webhooks from the Integrations tab.

How maxItems shapes a scheduled run

In search mode maxItems stops the index walk once that many stories have been picked, so in incremental mode it bounds how many stories are CHECKED, not how many changes come back: unchanged stories among them are simply not returned. For monitoring, set maxItems to 0 (as in the example above) so every run can scan the whole search: a walk the cap stopped early never produces EXPIRED rows.

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	search	search to walk the story index, url to scrape pasted links.
query	string	werewolf (prefill)	Search mode only. Free text keyword. Empty returns the site's default listing.
category	select	any	Search mode only. One of the site's own 22 categories. Checked live every run.
filter	select	all	Search mode only. Every story, or finished stories only. Applied by the site.
language	select	any	Search mode only. One of the 26 languages the site says stories are written in. Resolved live to the site's own numeric language id and sent with the search, so the site narrows the results.
startUrls	array	one example of each shape (see URL mode)	URL mode only. Story, chapter, search, listing and author links or bare numeric story ids, mixed freely.
tags	array	(none)	Both modes. Keep only stories carrying at least one of these tags. Applied by the actor, not the site.
mature	boolean	true	Both modes. Leave on to keep every story, switch off to drop mature-flagged ones.
authors	array	(none)	Author mode. Author names or profile links; returns each author's published stories. Start URLs are ignored while set.
access	select	any	Keep only free or only paywalled stories. Applied by the actor.
minimumVotes	integer	0	Keep only stories with at least this many votes. Applied by the actor.
minimumReads	integer	0	Keep only stories with at least this many reads. Applied by the actor.
sortBy	select	(none)	Rank the candidates read by votes, reads, comments or recent update, highest first.
fetchAuthorProfile	boolean	false	Add an authorProfile block, one extra public profile read per distinct author.
fetchChapters	boolean	true	Include the chapter list. Free: it ships inside the story record.
fetchChapterText	boolean	false	Also download every chapter's body text. One extra request per chapter.
fetchComments	boolean	false	Also download the comment thread, end-of-chapter and inline together.
commentScope	select	all	Keep both kinds of comment, end-of-chapter only, or inline only.
maxCommentsPerStory	integer	20	Cap on comments per story across all its chapters. 0 returns the story without its thread.
includeReplies	boolean	false	Also fetch the replies under each comment. One extra request per comment that has any.
maxRepliesPerComment	integer	5	Cap on replies per comment. 0 for every reply published.
maxItems	integer	10	The run's cap, counted on stories RETURNED. 0 for unlimited.
maxPages	integer	0	Index pages per search scope. 0 means no limit.
resumeFromRunId	string	(none)	Continue one interrupted run from its run or dataset id.
incrementalMode	boolean	false	Return only what changed since the last run of the same search.
stateKey	string	(none)	Name a monitoring campaign, or deliberately share state.
emitUnchanged	boolean	false	Also return unchanged rows. These are billed.
emitExpired	boolean	false	Also return rows that disappeared. These are billed.
ignoreFieldsForChanges	array	(none)	Field names (plain, or dotted for nested fields) to leave out of change detection, for example coverUrl. Ignored fields stay in the output. Changing the list never marks tracked stories as changed.
proxy	object	Apify Proxy	Connection configuration. The standard pool is enough for this site. If your account's connection is refused, the run continues on a backup connection and says so in the log. Your own proxy URLs are never replaced by a backup.
mcpConnectors	array	(none)	Optional MCP connectors to pipe results into.
notionParentPageUrl	string	(none)	Notion parent page id, for the Notion connector.
maxNotifyListings	integer	50	Cap on items written to each connector per run.

Incremental mode, and what counts as a change

In incremental mode each story carries changeType (NEW, UPDATED, REAPPEARED or EXPIRED), changedFields, firstSeenAt and lastSeenAt.

What counts as a change here is an EDIT, not engagement drift. The engagement counters readCount, voteCount and commentCount are deliberately left out of the comparison, and so are the two nested arrays chapters and comments: on a live story those move between two reads minutes apart, so including them would mark every story UPDATED on every run and the change feed would be worthless. A story whose read count doubled overnight is therefore reported UNCHANGED, on purpose.

What IS compared: numParts, title, description, tags, categories, isCompleted, isMature, language, coverUrl and the site's own modifiedAt. So a new chapter, a retitle, a rewritten blurb, a tag or category edit and a completion flip all still classify as UPDATED and still name the exact field in changedFields. comments, chapters, readCount, voteCount and commentCount never appear there.

EXPIRED rows are only produced once a run has fully scanned the tracked search, so never after a capped run, never after a resumed run, and never when a scope hit the site's own result-depth limit. A chapter-text or comment request that failed does not enter the baseline as a real change either: the previous run's values are carried forward instead, so a one-off connection problem cannot fake an update.

ignoreFieldsForChanges adds your own fields to that exclusion. Whether a story is UNCHANGED is decided by comparing its stored snapshot with the new one under your CURRENT list, so editing the list between runs causes no one-time wave of UPDATED rows, and an ignored field never appears in changedFields. The list is not part of the automatic state key.

Leave stateKey empty unless you mean to share state: each differently configured search then keeps its own baseline automatically. Two different searches given the SAME stateKey share one baseline, so with emitExpired on, a run of one reports the other's stories as EXPIRED.

Send results into your apps (MCP connectors)

Results can optionally be piped into the apps you already use, through Model Context Protocol connectors, without changing the dataset at all.

1. Authorize a connector under Apify, Settings, API & Integrations.
2. Select it in the Export to your apps (MCP connectors, optional) section of the input (mcpConnectors).
3. For Notion, set notionParentPageUrl to the page under which item pages should be created.
4. maxNotifyListings caps how many items are written to each connector per run.

Supported out of the box: Notion, Linear, Airtable and Apify. What gets written is a condensed, human readable summary per item, a title plus the key fields flattened to plain text, not the full JSON: nested objects collapse to their main value and arrays trim to a few names. The complete record always stays in the Apify dataset. If a connector fails, the run still succeeds and the dataset is unaffected.

Output Example

Sample shape, values are illustrative placeholders, not from a live story.

{
  "storyId": "100000001",
  "title": "The Sample Werewolf Chronicles",
  "url": "https://www.wattpad.com/story/100000001-the-sample-werewolf-chronicles",
  "description": "A one paragraph blurb, exactly as the author wrote it.",
  "coverUrl": "https://img.example-cdn.test/cover/100000001-256.jpg",
  "author": "sample_author",
  "authorUrl": "https://www.wattpad.com/user/sample_author",
  "language": "English",
  "categories": ["Werewolf"],
  "tags": ["werewolf", "alpha", "mates"],
  "isCompleted": true,
  "isMature": false,
  "rating": 1,
  "copyright": 1,
  "numParts": 44,
  "readCount": 1234567,
  "voteCount": 89012,
  "commentCount": 34567,
  "wordCount": 412345,
  "firstPartId": "200000001",
  "createdAt": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "modifiedAt": "2026-01-02T00:00:00Z",
  "chapters": [
    {
      "chapterId": "200000001",
      "title": "Chapter 1: The Sample Beginning",
      "url": "https://www.wattpad.com/200000001-sample-chapter-one",
      "wordCount": 8123,
      "rating": 1,
      "isDraft": false,
      "createdAt": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
      "modifiedAt": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
      "readCount": 98765,
      "voteCount": 4321,
      "commentCount": 876,
      "photoUrl": "",
      "videoId": "",
      "text": "The chapter body appears here when chapter text is switched on.",
      "paragraphs": [
        { "id": "5a1b2c3d", "text": "The first paragraph of the chapter." }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "chaptersReturned": 1,
  "comments": [
    {
      "commentId": "200000001_5a1b2c3d_1767225600_aaaa1111",
      "scope": "inline",
      "paragraphId": "5a1b2c3d",
      "text": "This line broke me.",
      "author": "sample_reader_01",
      "authorUrl": "https://www.wattpad.com/user/sample_reader_01",
      "createdAt": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
      "modifiedAt": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
      "status": "active",
      "replyCount": 1,
      "url": "https://www.wattpad.com/200000001-sample-chapter-one",
      "replies": [
        {
          "commentId": "200000001_5a1b2c3d_1767225601_bbbb2222",
          "scope": "inline",
          "paragraphId": "5a1b2c3d",
          "text": "Same, I had to put the phone down.",
          "author": "sample_reader_02",
          "authorUrl": "https://www.wattpad.com/user/sample_reader_02",
          "createdAt": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
          "modifiedAt": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
          "status": "active",
          "replyCount": 0,
          "url": "https://www.wattpad.com/200000001-sample-chapter-one",
          "replies": []
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "commentId": "200000001__1767225602_cccc3333",
      "scope": "part",
      "paragraphId": null,
      "text": "Updating soon, I hope.",
      "author": "sample_reader_03",
      "authorUrl": "https://www.wattpad.com/user/sample_reader_03",
      "createdAt": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
      "modifiedAt": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
      "status": "active",
      "replyCount": 0,
      "url": "https://www.wattpad.com/200000001-sample-chapter-one",
      "replies": []
    }
  ],
  "commentsReturned": 2,
  "commentsComplete": false,
  "scanComplete": true,
  "enrichmentSkipped": false,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-01-02T00:00:00Z",
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.wattpad.com/story/100000001-the-sample-werewolf-chronicles",
  "changeType": "NEW",
  "changedFields": [],
  "firstSeenAt": "2026-01-02T00:00:00Z",
  "lastSeenAt": "2026-01-02T00:00:00Z"
}

Plan Requirement

Runs on any Apify account, including the free plan, and needs no residential connection: measured pages from Wattpad loaded with real content on a standard data-centre connection, with no challenge or block observed. Leave Apify Proxy enabled in the Proxy & connection section. Apify free plans do not include residential proxies. If the connection chosen for your account is refused, the log shows "The selected connection is unavailable to this run." and the run continues on a backup connection, then notes "Served over the backup connection (the default connection was unavailable)." once it reads data. If no page can be loaded at all, the run ends as failed with the reason: "Could not load any results page (the requests failed), so nothing was collected. This is a connection problem, not an empty search. Please try again later." When your plan has no proxy access at all, the failure says so and points to the Apify pricing page. Your own proxy URLs are never replaced by a backup. No Wattpad account, login or subscription is needed, and none is used.

FAQ

How much does it cost?

You pay per story returned, plus one detail-enrichment event for a story that received chapter text, the comment thread, or both, charged once no matter how many chapters or comment pages it took. The Pricing tab shows current rates. Use Max results to cap the cost of any run.

Is it legal to scrape Wattpad?

This actor reads only what Wattpad shows any anonymous visitor: no login, no account and no credential of any kind is used anywhere in it. You are responsible for how you use the data: follow Wattpad's terms and the laws that apply to you, and get legal advice before republishing story text, comments or usernames at scale.

Can I get only new or changed stories on a schedule?

Yes. Schedule the actor from the Schedules tab and turn on Incremental mode. Later runs then return only NEW, UPDATED and REAPPEARED stories, and unchanged ones are not returned or billed unless you turn on Emit unchanged.

Why does search mode never return mature stories?

That is the site's own public index, not a gap in this actor: an anonymous search always comes back with the mature flag false, even on a query that plainly matches mature work. Fetch a mature story by its own link or id in url mode instead, where the flag is reported correctly.

Why did my run fail instead of returning an empty dataset?

If the source refuses every request, the run stops with a clear message so "no stories matched" is never confused with "nothing could be read". Run it again in a few minutes. A search whose first page comes back empty is checked with one extra read before it is ever reported as empty, so a brief refusal is not published as a genuinely empty result.

Can I use it with AI agents or MCP?

Yes. Call it from any Apify integration or MCP client, and use the connector field to push results into Notion, Linear or Airtable.

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