YouTube Shadowban Detector
Find out whether a setting is suppressing your video — or whether it just underperformed.
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Tool input
Overview
About this tool
YouTube has no shadowban, but it has five settings that quietly remove a video from search, recommendations, embeds and the subscriber feed. This checks every one of them on a public video and tells you which is costing you reach.
Instructions
How to use it
Paste the video that is not getting the reach you expected. The tool checks five public visibility signals and scores them by how much reach each one costs when it is set wrong.
What "shadowban" actually means on YouTube
It does not mean anything — YouTube has no such feature. What it does have is restriction: an age gate, a made-for-kids flag, an unlisted setting, embedding turned off. Every one of those is publicly visible, which is why a tool can check them and why nobody has to guess.
A clean result is still useful
If all five come back clear, the video is not being suppressed — which redirects the question to the thumbnail, the title and the first thirty seconds. That is where the answer almost always is, and it is much harder to accept than a penalty, which is exactly why the myth persists.
Questions
Frequently asked
My video is clean but still got no views. What now?
Then distribution was offered and refused. Check the click-through rate and the first-30-second retention in Studio: a low CTR is a packaging problem, and a cliff in the first half minute is an opening problem.
Does age restriction really matter that much?
Yes. It removes the video from signed-out viewing, blocks embedding entirely, excludes it from most recommendation surfaces, and limits ads. It is the single most costly setting on this list.
Why does the feed check only apply to recent videos?
A channel’s public RSS feed holds only the 15 most recent uploads, so an older video being absent means nothing. The check is skipped past 30 days rather than reported as a false alarm.
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