Paste your video's title, description and tags — or load a published video by URL — and audit them against a scoring rubric printed in full on this page: keyword placement, pixel-true title fit, chapter validity, hashtag policy and the 500-character tag budget. No search-volume or competition numbers are shown, because no honest free source for them exists; every figure here is measured from your own text. Works before you publish, for long-form videos and Shorts, entirely in your browser.
Solid foundation — clear the quick wins before publishing.
A transparent checklist score with the weights printed below — not YouTube data. This tool has no YouTube API key, so it shows no search-volume or competition numbers; any free tool that does is estimating or inventing them.
| Variant | Title score | Chars | Mobile visible | Still missing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A — current title | 26/30 | 71 | 100% | Title length in the working zone · Title survives real layouts (pixels) |
TubeBuddy and YouTube's own Test & Compare run title tests on live traffic after publishing. This is the pre-publish version: same rubric, no audience spent.
Home Workout for Beginners — 20-Minute Full Body Routine (No Equipment)
Home Workout for Beginners — 20-Minute Full Body Routine (No Equipment)
Home Workout for Beginners — 20-Minute Full Body Routine…
Home Workout for Beginners — 20-Minute Full Body Routine (No Equipment)
Exact phrase "home workout for beginners" appears in the title.
The keyword starts at character 1 of 71. Earlier placement survives truncation and reads as the topic, not an afterthought.
71 characters. 40–70 characters is the range where the full title usually survives desktop and mobile layouts.
Fix: Trim toward the zone: cut adjectives and move detail into the description.
Up next — sidebar: 79% visible · Home — mobile app: 100% visible. Measured with a Roboto text model at YouTube's real column widths — characters alone can't tell you this.
Fix: Shorten the title or move the payoff earlier — the sidebar (168px thumbnail, ~202px title column) cuts first.
"full" is doing persuasive work in this title.
contains a number, uses a bracketed qualifier
No ALL-CAPS abuse, keyword repetition or emoji pile-up detected.
970 characters · 161 words. YouTube gives you 5,000 characters of searchable text; strong descriptions usually run 1,000+.
Fix: Expand with a real summary of what's in the video, who it's for and what viewers will learn — relevant text, not padding.
The keyword sits inside the snippet zone search results actually display.
1 exact mention in the description. 2–6 reads as topical focus; beyond ~7 it starts to read as stuffing.
Fix: Thin the repetitions out — keep the mentions that help a human understand the video.
Timestamps found but the block is not valid yet: Chapter at 0:42 is only 7s after the previous one — each chapter must be at least 10 seconds long.
Fix: Fix the chapter block: start at 0:00, list at least 3 chapters, keep them increasing with 10+ seconds between them.
2 links in the description.
A recognisable call to action is present.
4 hashtags: #HomeWorkout #Fitness #BeginnerWorkout #NoEquipment. Only the first three display above the title.
Fix: Trim to the 3 that best describe the video; the rest add nothing and past 15 total they void the whole set.
9 tags. 8–15 tags is the working range: enough to cover the topic's angles without diluting into a keyword dump.
155 of 500 characters used. Counted as YouTube counts: tag characters plus the commas between them.
Fix: Use more of the budget with specific multi-word phrases viewers actually type.
The exact target phrase is one of your tags.
Repeated: home workout — duplicates burn budget and add no new relevance.
Fix: Delete the repeats and spend the freed characters on a new long-tail phrase.
7 multi-word phrases and 2 single-word tags (22% single-word). Single words like "fitness" match everything and rank for nothing; phrases carry the intent.
Present in 3 of 3 fields (title ✓ · description ✓ · tags ✓). Search reads the three fields as one relevance picture.
Mined from your description: "https example", "https example com", "example com", "full 4-week", "com beginner-plan". 0 of them also appear in the title or tags.
Fix: Take the strongest phrase your own description keeps repeating and make sure it lives in the title or the tag set too.
4 hashtags across title + description — inside YouTube's 15-hashtag policy.
9 full sentences detected. YouTube's guidance is explicit: descriptions should read like prose written for humans, and keyword-list dumping can be treated as spam.
No repeated-line stuffing or caps shouting detected.
Everything runs in your browser. Your draft autosaves on this device only; the single network request in this tool is the optional oEmbed fetch to YouTube when you load a published video.
Checks that need a target keyword are skipped — not zeroed — when none is set, and the category score rescales over the checks that ran. 80+ publish-ready · 60–79 solid · 40–59 needs fixes · below 40 rework the basics.
Every YouTube SEO score on the internet is a black box — '30+ ranking factors', trust us. This one publishes the full rubric on the page: Title 30, Description 30, Tags 20, Keyword & structure 20, each check named with its points, each result showing the exact measurement behind it. If you disagree with a weight, you can see precisely which one and discount it. A score you cannot audit is marketing; a score you can audit is a checklist.
Character counts lie. Fifty characters of wide capitals overflow a sidebar that swallows ninety characters of narrow lowercase, and the 'first 45 characters' rule of thumb other checkers quote is a guess wearing a number's clothes. This tool measures your title with a real text-layout model at YouTube's actual column widths — mobile home, desktop home, search and the up-next sidebar — and prints the verbatim text viewers will read on each surface, with the percentage that survives and the characters that were cut.
Most checkers award points for the mere presence of timestamps. YouTube is stricter: the first timestamp must be 0:00, there must be at least three, they must strictly increase, and each chapter must run at least ten seconds — break any rule and the whole block silently fails to become chapters. This tool parses your timestamp lines the way YouTube does and reports the exact line that breaks the rules, before you publish instead of after you wonder why Key Moments never appeared.
Two rules almost no checker implements: YouTube shows only the first three description hashtags above your title, and if a video carries more than fifteen hashtags in total, YouTube ignores every single one of them. The audit counts hashtags across title and description, flags the void-the-whole-set case in red, and scores the set you will actually benefit from — one to three precise tags placed where they display.
YouTube's Test & Compare and TubeBuddy's A/B tests need a published video and real traffic — the audience pays for the experiment. Variant slots B and C here score alternative titles against the identical rubric as your current one: keyword placement, length zone, pixel fit on mobile and sidebar, power words, hook elements. The weaker draft dies in this tab, for free, instead of in your analytics two weeks from now.
Keyword tools with volume numbers are selling estimates — there is no public YouTube search-volume data, and this tool refuses to invent any. What it can do honestly is mine your own title, description and tags with a statistical phrase extractor, then show you the gap: strong phrases your description keeps repeating that never made it into the title, the tag set or your target. One click promotes a gap phrase to your target keyword or appends it as a tag.
YouTube search matches a viewer's query against your video's metadata — title, description, tags — then ranks the matches by relevance, engagement and quality. The metadata is the only part of that equation you fully control before publishing, and it is genuinely worth optimising: a video whose packaging never enters the candidate pool cannot be rescued by retention. So a youtube seo tool has one honest job: audit the packaging against everything that is publicly known about how YouTube reads it, find the unforced errors, and order the fixes by impact. What it cannot do is tell you how many people search your keyword, how hard it will be to rank, or where your video will land. YouTube publishes none of that data. vidIQ and TubeBuddy show volume and competition figures built from their own estimate pipelines — usable as relative hints, never as measurements — and free checkers that display a precise "12.4K searches" figure with no data source are showing you a simulator. This tool draws the line where the data runs out: every number on the page is measured from your text, and the scoring rubric is printed in full beside the score.
The title is the strongest relevance signal you control and half of the click decision, so it gets the joint-largest share of the rubric. The checks reward an exact-phrase target keyword placed early — position is measured, not just presence — a length inside the 40–70 character working zone for long-form video (25–60 for Shorts), one honest power word, and one hook element: a specific number, a bracketed qualifier, or a question framing. Then comes the check no character counter can do: the pixel fit table. A wrap model at each surface's real title-column width computes exactly what survives the two-line clamp on mobile home, desktop home, search and up-next, down to the verbatim string and the hidden character count. The pattern it exposes is consistent — search is generous, the sidebar is ruthless — and the fix is almost always the same: the payoff moves to the front, the searchable detail rides in the tail, and the brand name goes last. When the thumbnail half of the click needs the same treatment, the YouTube thumbnail preview renders your artwork inside mock feeds against real competing videos.
YouTube indexes up to 5,000 characters of description, but only the first ~150 appear in search snippets — so the rubric scores depth (strong descriptions usually run past 1,000 characters of real, relevant text) separately from placement (the target phrase inside the snippet zone, then mentioned a natural two-to-six times through the body rather than stuffed). Chapters get a validity engine rather than a presence tick, because YouTube's chapter rules are exact and unforgiving: first timestamp 0:00, at least three entries, strictly increasing, ten seconds minimum per chapter. Links and a recognisable call to action close the section, because a description that ranks but gives the viewer nowhere to go next has done half its job. If writing that description from a blank box is the actual bottleneck, the YouTube description generator drafts the structure — then bring the draft back here and audit it before it goes anywhere near an upload.
YouTube itself says tags play a minimal role in discovery — they mainly rescue misspellings and ambiguous topics — so this rubric weights them at 20 of 100 and treats them as hygiene: 8–15 tags, a genuine share of the 500-character budget used (counted the way YouTube counts, commas included), the exact target phrase first, no duplicates quietly burning characters, and a mix weighted toward the multi-word phrases viewers actually type instead of single broad words that match everything and rank for nothing. Every tag renders as a chip with its own diagnostics — duplicate, broad, exact-target — so the set can be cleaned at a glance. The sibling hashtag generator covers the separate hashtag set that displays above your title; remember the policy line this tool enforces — three display, fifteen is the cliff edge past which YouTube ignores them all.
Paste any public YouTube link and the tool loads its real title and channel from YouTube's public oEmbed endpoint — the same honest data route the thumbnail preview uses — so you can audit a competitor's title craft or re-check your own older uploads. Then the honesty matters: oEmbed publishes a title, a channel name and a thumbnail, and nothing else. Descriptions and tags of other people's videos are not public data without the YouTube Data API, so this tool asks you to paste your own from Studio and shows a competitor's description or tags never — rather than presenting scraped or invented numbers as fact. What you can legitimately learn from a rival is all here: how their title is built, where the keyword sits, how much of it survives the sidebar. Paired with the keyword extractor for mining a rival's public text or your own scripts, that is the full extent of what public data supports — anyone promising more is selling the difference.
The workflow this tool is built for runs in one sitting: paste the draft, set the target, clear the quick wins in points order, settle the title with the variant comparison, then export — a Studio-ready metadata pack, the tags as a clean comma list, or the full audit as a Markdown report for a client or a channel manager. Once the video is live, the audit's job is done and Studio's begins: impressions click-through rate tells you whether the packaging earned the click, and average view duration tells you whether the video kept the promise the title made. A high score here removes the reasons a video gets skipped in search; it cannot manufacture demand for a topic, and it never claims to. When the views the packaging wins start turning into income questions, the creator earnings calculator prices them by niche and region. Everything in the audit itself runs in your browser — drafts autosave on this device only, nothing is uploaded, there is no account, no credit system and no premium tier, and the whole tool installs to your home screen like an app.
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