Picture this. A creator with 400,000 subscribers spends six minutes reviewing your product. They loved it. They never typed your handle.
YouTube will never tell you about that video.
YouTube mentions are a real, built-in feature. Creators tag other channels with an @handle, the tagged channel may get a notification, and the mention shows up in YouTube Studio. But the feature only sees people who tag you.
Plenty of people who talk about your brand on YouTube never do.
So, I tell you how YouTube mentions work, how to mention someone, where to find your mentions, and how to turn them off.
Then I show you how to track YouTube mentions that the official feature misses, and how I turn them into social proof on your website.
For the bigger picture across platforms, see our social listening suite.
What are YouTube mentions?
A YouTube mention is an @handle that links to another channel. It’s YouTube’s version of the classic social media mention. You type “@” plus a channel’s name or handle, pick it from the suggestions, and YouTube turns it into a clickable link.
Mentions became possible across the platform when YouTube rolled out @handles in October 2022. Every channel got a unique handle, and those handles now work in Shorts, comments, descriptions and channel URLs.
Where YouTube mentions appear
According to YouTube’s own privacy setting, if you allow it, anyone can mention you in video titles, video descriptions, posts and comments.
This covers the following:
- Video titles. For example “My setup tour ft. @creatorname”.
- Video descriptions. The most common spot for shout outs, collabs and sponsors.
- Posts. Community posts on a channel.
- Comments. Replies that tag a channel or a person.
There’s no fixed cap on how many channels you can mention. Google says you can mention as many creators as you want, as long as the names fit within the character limit.
What happens when you get mentioned
Two things happen:
- Viewers can tap the mention. A creator info panel slides up from the bottom of the screen with the mentioned channel’s info and recent videos.
- You may get a notification. Google’s words: “Not every mention triggers a notification. Important ones, like when a creator with a similar number of subscribers mentions you, will notify you.”
One thing that doesn’t happen: a mention doesn’t push the video to your subscribers. Google states that mentions don’t make a video more likely to be shown to the mentioned channel’s audience.
How to mention someone on YouTube?
Mentioning another channel takes a few seconds. The trick is picking the handle from the suggestion list, so YouTube creates a real link instead of plain text.
In video titles and descriptions:
- Open YouTube Studio and go to Content.
- Click the video you want to edit (or start a new upload).
- In the Title or Description field, type @ followed by the channel’s name or handle.
- Choose the channel from the recommended list.
- Click Save.
The same works in the YouTube app on Android and iPhone when you edit a video’s details.
In comments and posts
Type @ and start typing the handle in a comment, reply or community post, then pick the channel from the suggestions. If you just type the name without selecting it, you get plain text, and the channel won’t see it as a mention.
How to see mentions on YouTube
This is where most people get stuck. The mention notification is easy to miss, and a lot of creators don’t know there’s a dedicated place to see them.
To see all your mentions on YouTube:
- Open YouTube Studio on desktop.
- Click Community in the left menu. (Google’s help page still calls it Comments, depending on your account.)
- Open the Mentions tab, next to Comments and Viewer posts.
You’ll see the mentions that YouTube has logged for your channel. If you see “No mentions found”, either nobody has tagged you yet, your mentions are turned off in your settings, or people didn’t use the “@” symbol when tagging you.
You’ll also see some mentions in your notification bell. But remember the rule above: only the ones YouTube considers important.
How to turn off mentions on YouTube
If you’re getting spammy tags, or you’d rather not have your channel linked from videos you don’t control, you can switch mentions off.
On the YouTube app:
- Tap your profile picture and open Settings.
- Tap Privacy.
- Toggle Allow users to mention me off.
To turn mentions on again, flip the same toggle back. For brands, I recommend keeping it on. Every tag is a free, clickable path from a creator’s audience to your channel.
YouTube mentions limits
The feature is useful. It’s also narrow. Here’s what it can’t do:
- It only sees tagged mentions. If a creator writes your brand name without the @, or says it out loud, it doesn’t count.
- It doesn’t always notify you. Google confirms smaller or less “important” mentions don’t trigger a notification.
- It’s one channel at a time. You can’t watch mentions of competitors, products or campaign names, so it’s useless for competitor benchmarking.
- There’s no export. You can’t pull your mentions into a spreadsheet or report.
- There’s no API for it. The YouTube Data API has 21 resource types, from videos to playlists to comments, and none of them returns mentions.
That last point matters. It means no third-party tool can pull your official YouTube mentions, including ours. Any tool that promises “YouTube mention tracking” is really tracking something else: keywords, hashtags or transcripts.
And that something else is where most of the value is.
Other types of YouTube mentions
When I audit a brand’s YouTube presence, the tagged mentions are almost always the smallest pile. Here’s what sits outside the Mentions tab.
Untagged brand mentions
A creator writes “Unboxing the new Acme blender” in the title and never tags @acme. Your name is right there in the text, but YouTube doesn’t treat it as a mention. These are findable with search, because the words are in the title, description or tags.
Branded hashtags
A creator adds #acmeblender to the description. Hashtags are the most trackable kind of mention on YouTube, because every hashtag has its own results page. If you run a creator program, this is the mention type you can control: ask every creator to use your branded hashtag.
We covered hashtag tracking in depth in our YouTube hashtag analytics guide, so I’ll keep this short here.
Creator reviews and spoken mentions
The creator says your brand name in the video. It’s not in the title, the description or the tags. These YouTube video mentions are often the most persuasive ones, like honest reviews, comparisons and “what’s in my bag” videos. They’re also the hardest to find, because you need a tool that searches transcripts or audio.
How to track YouTube mentions without tags?
You can catch a lot of untagged mentions for free. Think of it as basic YouTube monitoring: it just takes a routine. If you outgrow it, compare the best social media monitoring tools.
YouTube search filters
Search for your brand name in quotes, like “acme blender”, to match the exact phrase. Then open Filters, set the upload date to Today or This week, and set the type to Videos.
Run the same search for your product names, your founder’s name and your branded hashtag. Save the searches as bookmarks and check them weekly.
Google Alerts
Create a Google Alert for your brand name and add site:youtube.com to the query. Google emails you when it indexes new YouTube pages that match. It’s slow and incomplete, but it runs in the background for free.
The YouTube API
If you have a developer, the YouTube Data API’s search endpoint can run YouTube keyword monitoring on a schedule. You’ll need a YouTube API key, and you’ll hit a hard wall fast.
Since June 1, 2026, Google gives each project 100 search calls a day by default, with a maximum of 50 results per call. Here’s what that means for mention tracking (our math, based on Google’s published quota costs):
| How often you check | Calls per term per day | Terms one project can track |
|---|---|---|
| Every hour | 24 | 4 |
| Every 4 hours | 6 | 16 |
| Once a day | 1 | 100 |
So a brand that wants hourly checks on its name, two products, its CEO and one competitor needs 120 calls a day. That’s over the cap before the day is out. And the API still can’t see spoken mentions.
Free methods and the API will help you find mentions. They won’t help you do anything with them. That’s the part I care about most.
Better method: Track YouTube mentions with EmbedSocial
Let me be clear about what EmbedSocial does and doesn’t do. It doesn’t pull your official @mentions or read the Studio Mentions tab. Nothing can, since there’s no API for them.
What it does is collect the other YouTube mentions into one library, clean them up, and put the best ones on your website. Here’s how each piece works.
#Hashtag source
The #Hashtag source watches a YouTube hashtag and pulls the videos published under it. Point it at your branded hashtag and creator videos that use it land in your EmbedSocial library, no manual search needed. A new source starts with the latest 50 videos under the hashtag, and new ones sync from there.
This is the closest thing to automated mention tracking YouTube allows, and it powers our YouTube listening tool. It starts on the Pro Plus plan.
Videos, Shorts and Live sources
Found a great untagged review through search or a Google Alert? Add it with the Videos source. It takes one or more video URLs. Shorts and Live do the same for Shorts and livestreams, and you can display them on your site the same way.
This turns scattered finds into one searchable library of YouTube mentions, instead of a bookmarks folder nobody opens. It’s the same idea as good UGC management: collect once, reuse everywhere.
Channel and playlist sources
Some creators mention you again and again. Add their channel with the Channel source, or a themed playlist with the Playlist source, and their new uploads flow in automatically.
I also use this for competitor tracking: add a competitor’s channel and see what they publish without subscribing from a personal account. YouTube sources refresh every 24 hours.
AI filtering and tags
Hashtag sources get noisy. People reuse popular tags for unrelated videos. AI filtering drops the off-topic ones, and tags sort the rest by product, campaign or creator.
The result: a clean feed of real brand mentions, organized the way your team works.
Social Insights
Once mentions pile up, Social Insights shows you the top hashtags, keywords and authors across the videos you’ve collected, plus their sentiment and a timeline of how volume moves. It’s how you spot which product gets talked about most, which creators drive the conversation, and whether the tone is positive or negative.
YouTube widgets and shoppable videos
This is where YouTube mentions start paying off. Creator reviews are some of the best UGC video you’ll ever get. Pick the best ones and embed them on your site with a YouTube widget. Use a video testimonial layout on product pages, a hashtag feed on a campaign page, or a social proof block near your checkout.
Go one step further with a shoppable video widget. Tag your products on the videos, and viewers can shop straight from the creator’s review.
YouTube MCP for Claude and ChatGPT
With the YouTube MCP, you can work with your YouTube videos, creators and hashtag results from a prompt inside Claude or ChatGPT. Ask “which creators posted with #acmeblender this month?” and get a list back.
One ready-made automation fits mention tracking well: extract YouTube creators by hashtag into Google Sheets, so every creator using your hashtag lands in one list.
What to do with YouTube mentions
Tracking mentions is step one. Here’s what I do with them next.
Reply and thank the creator
Leave a genuine comment on the video from your brand channel. Make it specific and skip the sales pitch. Creators notice brands that show up, and a thank you costs nothing.
Build creator relationships
A creator who mentions you unprompted is your warmest possible influencer lead. Add them to a list, send product early, and invite them into your program. Here’s how to find influencers with social listening.
Turn mentions into video testimonials
An honest creator review beats any ad you’ll film. Put the best ones on your product pages as video testimonials.
Always ask the creator for permission first. A quick message or comment asking to feature the video is enough to start. Keep the approval in writing. Our UGC rights management guide covers the details.
YouTube mentions: key takeaways
- YouTube mentions are @handle tags in titles, descriptions, posts and comments. See them in YouTube Studio under Community (or Comments) > Mentions.
- Turn them on or off in Settings > Privacy > Allow users to mention me.
- The official feature misses most mentions. It doesn’t notify you every time, it ignores untagged and spoken mentions, and there’s no API for it.
- Track the rest with filtered YouTube search, Google Alerts, the API (up to 4 terms hourly per project) or EmbedSocial.
- Get value from them. Reply, recruit the creator, and put the best reviews on your website.
Tracking other platforms too? See our guides to Instagram mentions, TikTok mentions, Facebook mentions and LinkedIn mentions.
The official Mentions tab tells you who tagged you. EmbedSocial helps you find the creators who didn’t, and turn their videos into social proof.
