YouTube Tag Gap

What this tool does

This tool reads the fifty most recent uploads of your channel and a competitor's, tallies the tags on each side, and shows you what they use that you do not — ranked by how many views the videos carrying each tag have. It also shows what you share and what is unique to you.

How to use it

1. Paste your channel URL and a competitor's. Handles, /channel/UC… URLs, /c/ vanity URLs and any video URL from the channel all work.
2. Pick a country so each missing tag can also be checked against this week's trending index.
3. Read the gap table, then copy the top thirty tags or download the full CSV.

Limits you should know about

• Only the tags on the fifty most recent uploads of each channel are compared. Older videos are not read.
• If a channel leaves its tag field empty there is nothing to compare, and the tool says so instead of returning an empty table.
• View counts are lifetime totals at the moment of the lookup, not views since the tag was added.
• Twenty comparisons an hour per IP, because each one costs several API calls.

Questions people ask

Why fifty videos and not the whole channel?

Fifty recent uploads is enough to describe a channel's current tag vocabulary, and it keeps the lookup inside three API calls per channel. Reading a 5,000-video channel would cost a hundred times more quota and tell you mostly about what that channel did in 2019.

A tag is in the gap. Should I add it?

Only if it describes your video. The gap tells you what a competitor is signalling to YouTube that you are not; it does not tell you that the signal is true for your content.

What does the "trending in" column mean?

It checks each missing tag against videos on the Trending chart of the country you picked over the last seven days. A number there means the tag is not just this competitor's habit — it is in wider use right now.

Can I compare two channels that are not mine?

Yes. Nothing here is tied to an account, and neither channel needs to be yours.

Does the competitor find out?

No. Everything is read through the public API, exactly as if you had opened their videos yourself.

Related YouTube tools

All of them read live data from the YouTube Data API or from the Trending Tags Index. None of them need an account.
Last changed 4 September 2026 — see the changelog.