What This Audit Measures
Seven checks, weighted by how much each actually moves the needle on YouTube. The score is calculated only over the checks we could run, so a missing data point never silently drags your result down.
Title length and formatting (20%)
YouTube truncates titles at roughly 60 to 70 characters in search results and suggested feeds. Go over and the end of your title disappears where it matters most, which is why the keywords belong at the front. Under 30 characters and you are wasting indexable space. All-caps titles get flagged separately: they read as spam to a lot of viewers regardless of length.
Description depth (20%)
The description is the single largest block of text YouTube indexes for your video. Under 100 characters is a wasted opportunity; 250 or more gives the algorithm something real to work with. Write what the video actually covers rather than stuffing keywords — YouTube has been good at spotting the difference for years.
Chapters and links (15%)
A timestamp list anchored at 0:00 turns into chapters, which show up in search results as individually linkable sections and measurably help retention on longer videos. Links keep viewers inside your content instead of back on the homepage.
Hashtags (10%)
Two or three relevant hashtags add topical context and the first three appear above your title. Worth knowing: go over 15 hashtags and YouTube ignores all of them, so more is actively worse.
Engagement rate (15%)
Likes divided by views. Above 3% is strong, 1 to 3% is normal, below 1% usually means the title promised something the video did not deliver — which is an SEO problem, because YouTube watches how people respond to a video far more closely than it reads your metadata.
Ranking for its own title (20%)
The single most revealing check. We search YouTube for the video's exact title and look for it in the results. If a video cannot be found by its own title, it is either brand new or competing against something far stronger for that exact phrase — and a more specific title is usually the answer.
Why Tags Are Not in the Score
YouTube removed video tags from public page data, so no external tool can read them honestly any more — and any tool claiming to show a competitor's tags is guessing. That matters less than it sounds: YouTube has said for years that tags play a minimal role in discovery, useful mainly for common misspellings of your topic. Your title, description and thumbnail do the work.
Auditing a Whole Channel
This tool scores one video at a time. For channel-level signals — keywords, upload cadence, median views across recent uploads — use the channel checker. And if a video is scoring well but getting no traffic, the search visibility checker tests whether it is being surfaced in YouTube search at all. To rewrite what the audit flags, the title and description generators work from your video's own transcript.