Spam indicator
Copycat channel
What it checks
Whether a channel named after a much bigger channel also repeats that channel's video titles.
The exact rule
- First, the name. The channel's name is compared with every channel of 1 million subscribers or more that the checker has on record, ignoring case, spaces, punctuation and invisible characters. The bigger channel must have more subscribers. A name needs at least 3 letters or digits, one of them a letter.
- No match: N/A. That is almost every channel.
- With a match, the value is the share of the channel's public videos whose title matches one of the bigger channel's titles, from 0% to 100%. Titles are compared ignoring case, punctuation, emoji and tags such as "reupload", "HD", "1080p", "official video" and "lyrics". A title shorter than 10 characters after that never matches.
Why it can point to spam
Copying a popular channel's name and its titles is a quick way to catch viewers searching for the original, usually with reuploaded or look-alike videos.
When it fires on a legitimate channel
A creator's own second channel, such as a clips or archive channel under the same name, can repeat the main channel's titles. So can an authorised fan or translation channel, and a channel whose name happens to be the same ordinary phrase.
How to change it
If you run the channel and it is a creator's own second channel, link the two from each other's channel profile so viewers can see they belong together; this check will still match them. If the channel shares a name by coincidence, a more distinctive name ends the match: in YouTube Studio, go to Customization, then Profile, and edit the name.
If the videos are someone else's, YouTube's copyright and reused-content rules apply whatever this check says.