Spam indicators explained
The Spam Channel Indicator checks a YouTube channel for the signals below and weighs them into a spam score. Each page says what one indicator checks, the exact rule, when it fires on a legitimate channel and, where it can be, how a creator changes it in YouTube Studio.
The score is a set of signals worth a closer look, not YouTube's decision. The checker is made by Freedom!, not YouTube, and no single indicator means a channel is spam.
Channel profile and activity
What a visitor sees before watching anything: the picture, the banner, the description, the subscriber count, and whether the channel still uploads.
Not scored:
- No links to social networking sites. Switched off: YouTube's data doesn't reliably show a channel's links, so it reads N/A for every channel.
Subscribers, views and engagement
Whether the numbers fit together: subscribers against views and videos, and whether anyone reacts to the videos at all.
Signs of mass-produced content
Signals often seen on channels that turn out videos by the batch, reuse other people's work or borrow a bigger channel's name. None of them detects AI, and none proves a channel is automated.
- Mass-produced uploads on a new channel
- Burst uploads
- Copycat channel
- Wears a much bigger channel's name
Not scored:
- Copycat channel (old check). Replaced by the Copycat channel check above; its weight is 0.
- Most recent videos share one title. Built but not scored yet.
Video titles, descriptions and length
Patterns in what the videos are called, what their descriptions say and how long they run. Each one is the share of the channel's public videos that show it.
- Spammy video titles
- Videos with "Full episode" in their title
- Non-alphanumeric video titles
- Videos consistently longer than 40 minutes
- Legal phrases in video description
- Download links in video description
- Has "tags" in video descriptions
Not scored:
- Pay-per-click or ad-gated links in video descriptions. Built but not scored yet.