How to Find Your Biggest Competitors on YouTube

Find YouTube competitors by searching your niche's keywords, checking which channels your audience watches, and exploring recommendations beside your videos. Focus on channels serving the same audience and topics, not just channels with a similar subscriber count.

So if you've ever wondered "Who's my YouTube competition," you don't have to look far. Those are creators who:

1. Share the same audience as you (your viewers watch their videos too).
2. Create content similar to yours.
3. Have the same YouTube niche or channel focus.

Without a doubt, you want to know these creators and how they operate on YouTube. That helps you understand your niche, find video ideas, and slowly improve your channel.

Ready to get started? Here's how to find your biggest competitors on YouTube.

1. Start with Keyword Research

Before finding your competitors, you must know what your audience searches for on YouTube. "Ultimate frisbee?" "Training pit bull puppies?" "Dewy makeup hacks?"

It depends on your niche, of course. But every channel has query-based entry points, or in other words, phrases people use to find videos.

Why do you need to know this? Well, viewers don't see your videos only when they perform a search; they see content from competitors too.

Suppose you know what viewers are searching for on YouTube. In that case, you can reverse-engineer the process to find other channels they watch (your competition).

Check the Trends Tab in YouTube Studio

Here's how to find it:

1. Open YouTube Studio and select Analytics.

2. Open the Trends tab.

3. Explore Top searches when available, or enter a topic in the search bar. Select Save for relevant terms.

Top searches draws on your audience and saved searches over the last 28 days. Some insights vary by country, language and device, and your layout may differ during YouTube's Studio redesign.

2. Perform Some Searches with the Keywords You Found

Now that you know what viewers are searching for, it's time to do some testing. Take the keywords you just discovered and paste them into the YouTube search bar, one by one. With each search, take a look at the top video results. Which channels show up repeatedly?

Channels that appear repeatedly are candidates for your shortlist. Check that their videos address the same viewer needs and topics as yours; your search results can be influenced by your account activity.

Here's a quick example of what we mean. vidIQ viewers search for a few things on YouTube, including:

• How to start a YouTube channel
• How to monetize a YouTube channel
• How to get subscribers on YouTube fast

These searches surfaced channels including Think Media and Nick Nimmin.

• Think Media
• Channel Makers
• Nick Nimmin
• Cathrin Manning
• Erin On Demand
• Justin Brown
• Roberto Blake

What does your list look like after doing this exercise? Be sure to keep it handy because we'll add more competitors in the next step.

3. Discover What Viewers Watch Outside of Your Channel

In the YouTube Studio, there's a helpful tool that shows which channels your viewers watch outside of your own. Browsing this panel does two things for your competitor search:

1. Compare this report with your search shortlist. It may confirm some candidates and reveal others.
2. Reveal more competitors.

Ready to get started? Follow these steps to see what viewers are watching outside your channel.

1. Go to the YouTube Studio (studio.youtube.com) and click Analytics in the left navigation bar.

2. Click the Audience tab.

3. Scroll down and find the panel that reads Channels that your audience watches.

If this report is unavailable, YouTube may not have enough relevant audience data to display it. Use the keyword searches and recommended-video method in this guide to build an initial list.

Compare this report with your search shortlist. It may confirm some candidates and reveal others. For example, we see videos from Channel Makers, Think Media, and Nick Nimmin.

However, a few channels showed up that we didn't spot before. Now we can research even more creators (that we know our audience likes) to see what they're doing on YouTube and how we stack up against them.

This report shows other channels your viewers consistently watched over the past 28 days. The separate What your audience watches report covers videos, Shorts, live streams and podcasts from the past seven days. Check each channel's topics before adding it to your competitor list.

4. See Which Videos are Recommended Near Yours

Lastly, go to the video watch pages for your own content to see more competitors. This works best if you choose videos that represent your channel's focus, so try to click on the most relevant videos. For each video you choose, focus your attention on the right side of the screen.

This is where you'll see a list of video recommendations based on what you're currently watching or recently watched. It's a great place to find channels similar to yours, so take your time exploring!

Use these recommendations to discover candidates, not as proof of what your audience sees. YouTube uses the video you are watching as a main signal for what plays next, alongside other personalization signals. Check candidates against your niche and, when available, the Audience report from the previous step.

You'll probably come across channels you've already seen, but keep scrolling. There's often a surprise or two you wouldn't have seen coming.

In our case, we spotted a video from Colin and Samir. They highlight successful creators on their YouTube channel (just like we do), but we're only discovering them at this stage of our research.

The audience and recommendation checks added channels such as Film Booth and Colin and Samir to the original shortlist.

Creating a list like this helps you find competitors to watch, analyze, and learn from on YouTube.

For each channel, save its URL, the topic you share, where you found it, and the date you checked. Keep direct topic competitors separate from channels you follow only for inspiration. Recheck the list when your content focus changes.

But keep in mind that the list will change over time. As new channels emerge and viewers find new interests, you're bound to have fresh competition on YouTube.

Use the vidIQ Competitors tool to track your shortlist and sort its videos by views or views per hour.