SEO Check Tools
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YouTube Competitor Channel Analyzer

Paste any YouTube channel — get their top 10 videos by views with title scores, view counts, and 3 patterns you can borrow.

Works with @handle, youtube.com/@name, youtube.com/channel/UC…, /c/CustomName, /user/Username, or a bare channel ID.

3 analyses per day per IP — this lookup burns a chunk of our YouTube API quota, so the limit is stricter than other tools.

About the Competitor Channel Analyzer

Free competitor-analysis tools fall in two camps: bare metrics scrapers that hand you a CSV of view counts, or full-stack subscriptions like vidIQ that lock the useful parts behind a $19/mo paywall. This tool sits between them — it gives you the metrics anyone can pull, scores every top title against documented best-practice heuristics, and runs an AI pattern summary that calls out the specific structural choices their top 10 share.

Use it before publishing to a niche you don't yet dominate (paste 3-5 channels in that niche, find the patterns that consistently rank), or to study a specific competitor before making a content bet (paste their channel, see exactly what their top videos have in common that your channel doesn't).

How the analysis works

  1. Channel input is resolved to a YouTube channel ID via the Data API (handles handles, URLs, legacy custom URLs, and bare IDs). The same call returns the channel's uploads playlist ID.
  2. Two parallel calls — search.listordered by viewCount returns the top 10 video IDs (100 units), and playlistItems.listagainst the uploads playlist returns the latest 10 IDs by upload date (1 unit).
  3. The union of those IDs is deduplicated and fetched in a singlevideos.listbatch (1 unit total — videos appearing in both lists are fetched once).
  4. Our Title Score Checkerheuristics run on every title client-side — no extra API cost.
  5. Both lists go into a single Claude Haiku call. The model returnspatterns (3 specific structural choices visible in the top 10) anddirection (3 observations on how the latest 10 differ from the top 10). The system prompt forbids platitudes and demands references to actual data.

Total YouTube quota per non-cached analysis: ~103 units. Cached for 24 hours.

Frequently asked questions

What does this tool actually show me?+

Four layers. (1) A header for the competitor's channel — subscriber count, video count, total views, thumbnail. (2) Two AI-generated callouts: '3 patterns to borrow' (what historically worked from their top 10 by views) and 'Where they're going' (3 observations on how their LATEST 10 uploads differ from the top 10 — a direction signal). (3) A tab toggle between Top 10 by Views and Latest 10 Uploads. (4) For every video in the active tab: title (auto-scored by our Title Score Checker), views, likes, comments, publish date.

Why both top 10 by views AND latest 10 uploads?+

Top 10 by views is retrospective — what historically worked. Often those are old videos from when the channel found its formula. Latest 10 is prospective — current bets, possible new directions. The gap between the two lists is the real strategic signal: Are they doubling down on what worked? Pivoting? Experimenting? That's the kind of insight metrics-only dashboards never surface.

Why are the patterns so specific instead of generic advice?+

The AI is instructed to reference what it actually sees in the data and reject platitudes like 'post consistently' or 'be authentic'. If it can't find concrete patterns in the 10 videos, it simply returns fewer than 3 — better to ship a useful list of 2 than to pad with filler.

Why is the daily limit so low (3 per day)?+

Each analysis burns ~102 YouTube Data API units (channel lookup + top-videos search + video metadata batch). Our project's default daily quota is 10,000 units, so an unprotected tool could be exhausted by 98 lookups. The 3/IP/day limit keeps the quota intact for real users; cached results don't count against your limit.

What channel formats can I paste?+

Any of these resolve correctly: @MrBeast (just the handle), youtube.com/@MrBeast (handle URL), youtube.com/channel/UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA (channel-ID URL), youtube.com/c/MrBeast6000 (legacy custom URL), youtube.com/user/PewDiePie (oldest username URL), or a bare UC… channel ID.

How fresh is the data?+

Live from YouTube's official Data API every analysis, then cached by channel for 24 hours so a re-run returns instantly. View/like/comment counts in the result are accurate to the time of the underlying YouTube response.

Will I see tags for each video?+

Not yet. Tags are hidden by YouTube from the official API for non-owners (since 2022) — they're still extractable from the public watch page via scraping, but we defer that to v2 because the 10 parallel HTTPS fetches add complexity and a rate-limit risk that isn't worth it for the MVP. Use the standalone Tag Extractor on any single video URL to pull tags for that video.

Do you store the channels I look up?+

Cached results live in Redis keyed by channel ID with a 24-hour TTL — that's it. We don't keep a per-user log of who looked up what. IPs are only held in memory paired with the day to enforce the 3/day limit.

Related tools

The Competitor Analyzer plays well with the single-purpose tools.