YouTube Lab guide

Start with the sample

Open the sample: two saved searches around an invoicing idea, with generated videos, channel sizes and comments. It works offline and fills every view. It is labelled Sample, and you can remove it in one click.

Save a search and check it

Add a phrase, or fill in a pattern such as best ___, ___ alternative, ___ review or ___ vs. Press Check now. Requests go out one every 1.5 seconds from your computer, so a check takes a couple of minutes and you can keep working. A search already checked today is skipped unless you force it. If YouTube shows a check page instead of results, the check stops and says so. It never tries to get around it.

The five views

• Outliers: video views against channel subscribers on log scales, with a dashed line for what is typical at that channel size. The videos furthest above it are labelled and listed with a times expected figure. Circle size is comments.
• Momentum: uploads per month and the views those uploads hold, for the last 12 months by month and older years as their own bars, marked as dated by year.
• Voices: comment pain themes as a bubble map and ranked list, with likes and the matched phrase marked in each word for word quote. Pin a theme or a single comment.
• Videos: the fetched videos with views, views per day, comments and a views gained since last check column. Videos under 7 days old are marked too new to compare.
• Changes: new videos, the videos that gained the most views, and new comments since the last check. The first check is a baseline only.

Size every channel with your own key

A search result does not carry subscriber counts. The Lab reads them from the watch page of the videos it opens. To size every channel in one request, add a free YouTube Data API key in the Lab. The key is encrypted by your operating system, kept in a file of its own, and never shown to the window, a job, a log or your AI agent. Remove it any time.

Honest limits

• Videos without a known channel size are listed, not drawn on the Outliers chart. The Lab says how many are missing.
• The expected line is a least squares fit through your videos and appears only with at least 6 points. It shows what is typical in the sample, not a law.
• YouTube rounds subscriber counts to three significant figures, so channel sizes are about figures.
• Dates are approximate and the Momentum chart says so. Views are lifetime views of the videos uploaded in that month.
• Comment counts are what the check fetched, not every comment on the video.
• Pain themes are a count of phrases such as too expensive or I wish there was. A phrase match is a sign, not proof.

Pin, watch and ask

Pin a video, a comment or a whole theme with its quotes to the evidence board. Turn on the weekly re-check for a search (only while Desktop is open). Every action is an MCP tool: see the YouTube Lab group in the tools reference. Your own AI can refine the themes through those tools.