5 Best YouTube Comment Finder Tools [2023]

Last updated on March 30th, 2023 at 07:36 pm

YouTube is still the behemoth when it comes to search. It’s the second largest search engine in the world (second only to it’s parent, Google) and comments on the platform are a great way to engage your audience. However, sifting through all of the noise to find the comments you’re looking for can be the proverbial ‘needle in a haystack’.

The good news is that there are ways to find specific comments on YouTube, without having to scan through every single comment… by comment… by exhausting comment.

YouTube comment finders. They’re the productivity hack you’ve been searching for. If you’ve not dug into the solutions for searching within your (or competitors’) comments before, then buckle up because we’re going for a ride. 

The problems with viewing YouTube comments 

There are many reasons you may wish to view comments on a YouTube video. It may be your own video and you are looking for feedback on how to improve or you want to thank and respond to a commentator for their feedback and support. You may even want to find specific comments on your competitor’s videos as this can provide you with the valuable content feedback your target audience is looking for (something that you can use to improve your own offers on your own channel). 

The problem is that the comments section on YouTube gets clogged up quickly and can be a cesspool of nothingness to wade through. Especially if your video is popular. This makes finding individual comments extremely difficult at times. Fortunately, YouTube Comment Finders can help you search comments to find the relevant insights you’re looking for.

What are YouTube comment finders?

Before we get into the specifics of how to use YouTube comment finders, it is helpful to outline what they are. Put simply, a YouTube comment finder is a tool that allows you to search comments of your own or someone else’s videos. This means you can find out commenters’ opinions on specific issues, reply to specific commenters, and even discover what your next content topic should be. 

YouTube comment finder tools tend to be free tools offered by a third party, and range from sites you can use, to extensions that function within your chrome browser. They can also be used on Mobile as well, which means you can search for comments and engage with your viewers easily, even on the go. 

The best YouTube comment finder tools

1. YouTube Comment Search (YCS) Chrome Extension 

YouTube Comment Search (YCS) is hands down my favorite of the tools I was able to find and test online. As a YouTube comment finder tool, it seems to have the most robust offering of everything out there.

All you have to do is navigate to the Chrome Store, and then download the YCS extension. Follow the prompts below to install it. When it is properly installed you will see the YCS pop up in your browser on the righthand side.

The nice thing about this extension is that it automatically activates within a YouTube video without having to click the extension each time you’d like to search YouTube comments.

For example, I follow Robuilt on YouTube because he breaks down his entire Airbnb business and gives followers the ins and outs of what’s working, what’s not, how much it costs, and what his profit is. It’s a gold mine of information for anyone interested in Airbnb.

When watching this video titled “This is how much my tiny houses made on airbnb in one year” that garnered over 700K+ views the idea of wading through the 800+ comments to find anything valuable is daunting to say the least. However, with YCS I’m able to load all comments and filter by a large number of criteria. As you can see in the image below, it automatically loads underneath the video player.

What’s great is that I can search by specific keywords. Or I can filter comments only by the author or verified users. Or perhaps users have dropped in timestamps within their comments. I can use this information to see what about the content really resonated with the audience or they found useful in order to better inform my content strategy. For example, I can see at the 4:47 mark that Rob did something that made someone subscribe and at 16:57 another person thought this was the best part of the video. Reviewing these sections would allow me to think through content options in order to better engage an audience.

When thinking about why you’d like to use a YouTube comment finder tool like YCS, then the options are truly limitless when thinking about what you’ll get out of your results.

Key features 

YCS enables you to search the comments of a video and filter across replies to those comments, video transcripts, chat replay, time stamp, author commentary, and more… all by keyword. This is my #1 tool to search YouTube comments.

Pros

• YCS supports multilingual search
• YCS allows you to export comments
• YCS works in incognito mode
• YCS allows you to get the account’s history section
• YCS allows you to search directly in the comments – meaning that you don’t have to navigate away to another site. 

Price 

YCS is a free-to-use chrome extension. 

2. YouTube Comment Finder (YTComment)

YT comment is a third-party online tool that allows you to search any YouTube video for comments. 

Key features 

YTComment is a very simple tool to use. All you do is copy the URL of the video you want to search, visit their website, paster the URL of the YouTube video into their search bar, and type in the keyword you’d like to search for. 

This tool allows you to find all comments on the video through a specific keyword. On each search option you will be given the opportunity to filter by time (how recent) or relevance to better gather insight about what’s most important and whether or not it’s important now. For example, I searched “taxes” within our sample video (a term that’s important to consider with any business venture) and was immediately able to see all of the comments on this topic and what was most important to this audience.

Pros 

• You can bring up all comments
• You can search by keyword 
• You can filter by relevance 
• You can filter by time 

Cons 

• Working between tabs and websites is a bummer. While search is good, this causes friction.
• Filtering is limited.

Price 

YT Comment Finder is free to use. Although donations are accepted. 

3. Show YouTube Comments While Watching: Chrome Extension

Show YouTube Comments While Watching is less about searching comments, but makes the process of reviewing comments while watching a YouTube video 1000x simpler. The core offer is that it moves recommended videos below the YouTube video and replaces it with the comments in the sidebar. As you watch a YouTube Video this eliminates the aggravating ping pong match of scrolling back and forth between the video and the comment section.

Key features 

Show YouTube Comments While Watching displays comments in a side panel, allowing you to filter them on a number of options such as replies, top comments, and even the latest comments. 

You can use this interface to answer the most relevant comments and questions directly, and so improve engagement with your viewers. 

Pros 

• Extension is regularly updated
• Can be used within YouTube, so you don’t need to change sites
• Makes viewing YouTube comments easier while watching a video

Price : 

Show YouTube Comments While Watching is free to use. 

4. YouTube Studio 

While YouTube doesn’t allow you to search comments when you are in a specific video on YouTube, you can navigate away from the video and use YouTube Studio to do this. Although only for videos that you are the creator of, and not ones that belong to your competition. 

To do this just access your YouTube account profile and navigate to the comments section which is located along the left-hand side of the screen. 

Key features 

Some of the main features of the comments section in YouTube studio is that you can search by comments that have been published or that are held for review. 

You can also filter your results by comments that you have not yet responded to, which makes replying to viewers, and boosting your engagement so much easier. 

You can even search by comments that include questions, which once again makes providing value to your viewers much easier because you can reply directly to their queries. Additionally, being able to see only comments that contain questions means you will know exactly what your viewers are interested in which can help you generate ideas for future content. 

Pros 

• Allows you to search a range of useful categories 
• Allows you to filter your results for even better data 
• Is part of the YouTube platform 

Cons 

• Does not allow you to search competitors’ videos for comments 

Price

YouTube Studio is free.

5. Hadzy

Hadzy is a third-party online tool that claims it’s “developed with YouTube” (though the documentation link indicates this is a marketing tactic given all platforms use YouTube’s APIs). Marketing tactic or not, it’s my clear runner up based upon its ability to search YouTube comments. It allows you to analyze, sort, and search YouTube comments from your own videos or competition. 

Like YouTube Comment (above) Hadzy relies upon the insertion of YouTube video URL into their website. Simply copy and paste the URL into the Hadzy search bar and click ‘load data’. This gives you two options – comments or statistics.

This is ability to drill down is one of the things that I like most about the tool and an actual differentiator from the other options out there.

The comments option allows you to see comments with time stamps and engagement levels. Beyond that you can still search for specific keywords or authors. You can “one click” copy a comment to your clipboard. And lastly, it gives the option to randomly select a comment for inclusion in your marketing or as a winner to any contests you may have.

However, it’s the statistics tab that I think has the most value. There’s a trove of information here that would be valuable to anyone creating content or marketing to an audience. This can be broken down into three specific data sets:

1. Word Cloud – this allows you to see which words are most prevalent among your audience (searching for taxes earlier in the article… you can thank this word cloud). With this you can better understand what are recurring themes or areas that could use greater explanation.
2. Top Questions – Like AnswerThePublic, this allows you to get a view of which questions are most relevant, so you can answer them inline, with a response video, or in content on other platforms.
3. Top Commenters – Having a clear picture of who is interacting with your or a competitor’s content will allow you to better understand who you / they are creating content for. The demographic data can only take you so far. Getting a look at the comment history and relevancy is truly invaluable.

Key features 

The statistics option in your YouTube comment search is the clear winner here. The ability to better understand the words that are important to your audience, questions they need answered, and top commenters make this a solid option for people that want to search YouTube comments.

Pros 

• You can use it for any YouTube video
• Easy filter by author or by date
• Copy and paste comment functionality
• In-depth statistics that show top questions, top words, and top commenters

Cons 

• Separate website causes friction between YouTube and the YouTube comment search functionality

Price 

Hadzy is free to use.

Summary 

My top pick would be YouTube Comment Finder (YCS) with Hadzy coming in at a very close second. However, if you are looking to improve your engagement by responding to specific YouTube comments or better understand what’s working well for other creators in the space then using any one of the YouTube comment finders above will help you to get the results you’re looking for more easily.