Paste a video link and check your YouTube video SEO in seconds. You get a score out of 100 across the title, description, tags, chapters, format, and engagement — and a specific fix for every item that fails. No sign-up.
YouTube SEO gets talked about like a dark art, but the part you actually control at upload time is short and boring: the title, the description, the tags, the chapters, and whether the length matches the format you picked. Those fields are how YouTube works out what a video is about before anyone has watched it. Get them right and the video gets a fair shot. Leave them half-filled and you're asking the algorithm to guess.
This checker runs the same fixed set of checks on every video, so two videos with the same score got there the same way. It grades what's on the page — it doesn't guess at your niche and it doesn't rewrite anything for you.
The title is the single field that shows up everywhere: search, suggested, the subscriptions feed, notifications, browse. Aim for a full promise in roughly 50 to 60 characters. Shorter than that and it usually reads as a fragment with nothing for search to match; much longer and the end gets cut off exactly where the payoff tends to sit. All-caps and stacked exclamation marks don't help either — they read as low quality to viewers and add nothing YouTube can use.
A one-line description is a wasted field. Write a short paragraph or two covering what the video is about, who it's for, and where to go next. Add at least one link — a related video, a playlist, your other channel surfaces — so viewers who finish have somewhere to go instead of drifting off. The first couple of lines are the ones that show up before the "show more" fold, so put the substance there rather than a wall of hashtags.
Timestamp chapters don't rank a video on their own, but they change viewer behaviour, and viewer behaviour is what actually ranks. Someone who can jump straight to the part they came for stays; someone who can't, leaves. For YouTube to render them as real chapters you need at least three timestamps in the description and the first one must start at 0:00.
Tags are a weak ranking signal compared with the title and how people watch. They're still worth setting: they cost nothing, they help with the obvious spelling variations of your topic, and an empty tag list is a field you controlled and skipped. A handful of genuinely relevant phrases beats thirty padded ones — stuffing the list dilutes the signal rather than multiplying it.
A video of three minutes or less is treated as a Short and lives in the Shorts feed. Anything longer is a standard upload. The awkward zone is a horizontal video sitting just over the Shorts cut-off — too long for the Shorts feed, too thin to hold a browse-and-suggest audience. Pick a side. And if you're chasing the Partner Program, remember that Shorts watch time doesn't count toward the 4,000-hour requirement, so a long-form video with real runtime banks hours far faster per view. You can estimate how long 4,000 watch hours will take from your current pace, or check your monetization eligibility against the current requirements.
Being straight about the limits: this tool reads public video data. It can't judge your thumbnail, it can't watch your first 30 seconds, it has no access to your retention curve or your click-through rate, and it doesn't know whether anyone is searching for your topic. A high score means nothing technical is holding the video back. It is not a promise of views, and any tool that promises you views is selling something. If you want the signals it can't see, you need your own channel data — analyze a channel to see the public-data version, or connect yours for the rest.
It grades the parts of a video you control at upload time: title length and formatting, description depth, links in the description, timestamp chapters, whether tags are present and how well they cover the topic, whether the length fits the format you chose (Short or long-form), upload quality, category, and — once a video has enough views — how engagement compares with a loose benchmark. Every failed item comes with a specific fix.
Copy the video's URL from the address bar or the Share button, paste it into the box above, and press Check video. You'll get a score out of 100 and a pass/fail list. Work down the failed items — they're ordered so the ones worth fixing appear first. Then re-check after you save your changes in Studio.
It's free and there's no sign-up. Anonymous use is capped at a modest number of checks per day to keep the tool available for everyone. Signing in lets you check your own uploads without that cap, and adds channel-level tracking on top.
Yes — any public video works. It's a fast way to see how a competitor sets up their titles, descriptions, chapters, and tags, and to spot the things they leave on the table.
Around 50 to 60 characters is the practical sweet spot. Long enough to state a full promise rather than a fragment, short enough that it isn't cut off in search results, suggested videos, or on mobile. YouTube allows 100 characters, but anything past roughly 60 risks being truncated where it matters most.
Tags are a small signal — far weaker than the title, description, and how people actually watch. But they cost nothing to set, they help YouTube handle common misspellings of your topic, and an empty tag list throws away a field you fully control. Treat them as a cheap tidy-up, not a growth strategy.
Chapters don't rank a video by themselves, but they do change how people watch it. Viewers can jump to the part they came for instead of bouncing, and YouTube can surface key moments in search. For chapters to appear at all, you need at least three timestamps in the description and the first one has to start at 0:00.
Because metadata is the floor, not the ceiling. This checker grades what you control at upload time — it cannot see your thumbnail, your first 30 seconds, your retention curve, or whether the topic has an audience. A clean checklist means nothing is holding the video back technically. Getting watched is a separate job.