Your views suddenly drop, or you search for your own video's title and can't find it. It's natural to wonder about a shadowban. Start with this: YouTube doesn't acknowledge or publish any "shadowban" status, so no outside tool can confirm one. What you can do is rule out the real causes of lost reach, and most of them are visible if you know where to look.
Step 1: check YouTube Studio
Some information is only visible to you as the channel owner.
- Restrictions column. In Content, look at the Restrictions column for each video. Copyright claims, age restrictions and other limits show up here.
- Community Guidelines strikes. YouTube notifies you in Studio and by email. A strike temporarily blocks features such as uploading.
- Visibility. Make sure the video is Public, not Unlisted or still Scheduled.
- Audience setting. Videos set as made for kids have some features turned off, such as comments.
Step 2: search while signed out
Signed-in search results are personalized to your watch history, which makes them a poor test. Open a private or incognito window and run three searches:
- The video's exact title.
- The title plus your channel name.
- Your channel name or @handle.
If the video or channel appears on the first page for all three, search visibility is very likely fine.
Common reasons that aren't a shadowban
- The video is new. It can take a few hours to be indexed in search.
- The title is very common. If many videos use the same words, yours competes with all of them.
- Age restriction or region blocks. Fewer viewers are allowed to watch.
- Viewer response changed. Recommendations grow and shrink with how viewers react. A drop in views isn't the same as a penalty.
How our Shadowban Checker helps
Paste a video or channel URL into the Shadowban Checker and it runs the step 2 searches for you, signed out. For a video, we search the exact title, then the title with the channel name. For a channel, we search the channel name, the @handle and the title of its latest long-form video. We record whether each result appears on the first page and in what position.
We also read public signals that can limit reach: age restriction, region blocks, made-for-kids settings and disabled comments.
The verdict is one of four: shows up in search, lower visibility observed, not found in search, or can't check. We show the exact queries and positions so you can repeat the searches yourself.
The limits matter here:
- Searches run from one country (the one shown on the result) at one moment. Viewers elsewhere, or signed-in viewers, can see different results.
- We can't see private information such as copyright claims or strikes, so step 1 is still on you.
- Videos uploaded less than a day ago are marked as too new to judge.
If your video really isn't showing up
- Wait a day if it's new, then check again.
- Confirm the video is Public.
- Review age restrictions, audience settings, claims and strikes in YouTube Studio.
- Rewrite a generic title with words specific to your video, so it stands apart from similar uploads.