YouTube’s Latest Experimental Feature Shows Creators What Their Viewers Are Searching For

YouTube’s latest test feature is designed to give creators a better idea of what their viewers are looking to watch.

Called Search Insights, the feature is a proposed add-on to YouTube Studio that would “give creators the opportunity to see parts of what’s been searched in the last 28 days,” YouTube product lead Alina Verbenchuk says in the platform’s latest Creator Insider video.

The tab breaks insights down into two streams: one that shows the popularity of certain search keywords across YouTube’s whole user base; and one that only shows results for a creator’s own viewers.

So, for example, “Squid Game” might be a popular search term across all of YouTube, but a BookTube vlogger’s audience might be busy searching for Christmas reading recommendations or videos about behind-the-scenes details for the next season of Shadow and Bone.

Having both streams of data means creators will be able to plan out videos for what their current audience wants to see, and also (if they want to) expand to make uploads about highly searched topics that might bring in new viewers.

“We know how search is important for creators and how it’s important for content planning,” Verbenchuk says. “Our hope with Search Insights is that it will significantly improve content planning research, and that it will make it easier to create videos relevant to your channel’s niche by surfacing queries and what YouTube audiences are looking for.”

In addition to its core function of highlighting keywords YouTube users are searching for, Search Insights introduces something called Content Gaps.

“A search becomes a content gap when viewers can’t find information they were looking for,” Verbenchuk says. “For example, if viewers can’t find any results for a particular search inquiry, or they can’t find exact match for the topics they search for, or content found is low-quality, there is no high-quality content.”

Creator Insider’s demo example shows that general searches for “Chromebook” are numerous and return lots of results. But narrower searches, particularly for DIY/someone please help me topics like “how to install chrome os on pc” have a medium amount of searches, but few videos to answer those queries.

The Search Insights tab lets creators filter to show Content Gaps so that, if they’re interested, they can make videos to fill them.

As is the case with all YouTube tests, Search Insights might not end up becoming a permanent feature. But judging by the amount of positive feedback on Creator Insider’s video, plenty of YouTubers hope it does.