Why ChatGPT Isn’t Enough for YouTube Outreach in 2025
Jake Kitchiner
We’ve all heard it: “Just ask ChatGPT to find YouTubers.” For small-scale tasks, that sounds like an easy win — type a prompt, get a list, maybe even a ready-made outreach message. But when we put it to the test, we found out the hard way: if you’re serious about creator outreach, relying on a language model just doesn’t scale.
This post walks through our actual experience using ChatGPT to find creators — and shows where it falls short, why it’s not reliable for targeting, and how a proper discovery tool like ChannelCrawler solves the problem.
Trying ChatGPT: A Dead-End Workflow
We started by asking ChatGPT to help us find US-based entertainment YouTubers with 100K–1M subscribers.
The first result? Just two names: Elliot and Blimey Cow. Sure, they’re technically entertainment creators, but there was no way to control what sub-niches they were in. Were they comedy? Film reviewers? Kids content? It wasn’t clear — and we had no access to engagement rate, upload history, or even country confirmation.
So we pushed further and asked for 10 more creators. ChatGPT gave us three. No emails, no metrics, no category filtering — just names. And no guarantee they were even current or relevant.
“There’s no control over which types of creators ChatGPT brings back… And in this example, we only got two. Then we asked for ten more, and only got three.”
We quickly realised we couldn’t build any kind of real campaign from this.
Why This Approach Doesn’t Scale
The core problem is that ChatGPT isn’t a database. It’s a language model. It can suggest examples, write templates, and answer questions — but it doesn’t have access to live YouTube data. It can’t:
- Filter by niche, country, or engagement
- Validate whether a channel is active or not
- Show whether an email is available
- Prevent duplicates or return consistent results
It’s a dead-end for outreach at scale. At best, we got a handful of vague leads. At worst, we wasted time verifying whether they even existed.
What Scalable Discovery Looks Like
That’s when we turned to ChannelCrawler — built specifically for YouTube creator discovery.
We ran a search with the same goal: Entertainment creators in the US with:
- 100K–1M subscribers
- At least 2% engagement
- Active upload history
- Optional: email required
We also fine-tuned the category by excluding things we didn’t want — like music, movie reviews, or kids content. Within seconds, we had a curated list of 7,000+ creators who actually matched the criteria — all filterable, sortable, and ready to export.
“Instead of struggling to find 15 creators, we instantly had thousands of highly targeted options.”
Exporting Clean Lists (With Contact Info)
Once we had our shortlist, we exported only the creators with email addresses. The result was a clean CSV containing:
- Channel title, bio, and category
- Country and language
- Subscriber count and engagement rate
- Email (if available)
This list was ready to plug into our CRM or outreach tool — no extra research needed, no dead links, no guesswork.
Why This Matters for Outreach Teams
If you're doing creator outreach — whether for sponsorships, product seeding, affiliate programmes, or even recruiting brand ambassadors — the difference between guesswork and targeted data is night and day.
ChatGPT is great for writing. But discovery? That needs filters, performance data, and scalable exports. Without that, you're flying blind — or spending hours cleaning up after a bad list.
ChannelCrawler lets us discover and reach the right creators, faster — with tools designed for the job, not workarounds.
Need better creator data? Try it yourself. Run a targeted search and start building your YouTube outreach list in minutes.
