Why download the YouTube Brand Visibility Report?

YouTube is one of the biggest commercial channels in creator marketing.

This is a snapshot of tracked US YouTube sponsorship activity designed for the people who need more than vague trend pieces and recycled creator economy commentary. It is built for in-house influencer marketers and creator agencies who need a clearer view of what is happening on YouTube right now and what to do with that information.

This is not generic influencer marketing advice.
It is not filler.
And it is not a product brochure pretending to be research.

It is a proper market report built to answer a simple question:

Who’s sponsoring who on YouTube in the US, and what should smart teams do with that information?

Executive summary

YouTube is now one of the most important visibility channels in creator marketing. It sits at the intersection of mass reach, TV viewing, podcast consumption, product research and trusted creator-led recommendations. Brand activity on YouTube is no longer just a campaign tactic. It is a market signal.

In Q1 2026, ChannelCrawler analysed 144.8 million videos from 7.6 million eligible YouTube channels with more than 500 subscribers. Of those, 13.6 million videos mentioned at least one brand, meaning 9.4% of videos in the dataset referenced a brand.

That figure is both huge and surprisingly small.

At YouTube scale, 13.6 million brand-mention videos represents a massive volume of commercial visibility. But it also means more than 90% of videos did not include a visible brand link in the video description. Creators may still link to social profiles, donation pages, merch stores, newsletters or other platforms, but when you look specifically for identifiable brand links, the market is much less saturated than many teams might assume.

That tells us two things.

First, the whitespace is still significant. There are millions of creators publishing every quarter, but only a small share are visibly linking to brands in a way that suggests sponsorship, affiliate activity or commercial partnership.

Second, the brands that do show up repeatedly are usually not there by accident. They have often built the systems that make creator distribution easier: affiliate programmes, creator codes, tracking links, landing pages, clear offers and repeatable partnership processes.

Across the full dataset, the analysis identified 213,417 distinct brands and 5.46 million distinct URLs, averaging 26 URLs per brand. This shows how fragmented YouTube visibility can be. A brand’s presence is rarely contained in one homepage link or one campaign. It can spread across landing pages, tracking links, affiliate URLs, regional domains, product pages and creator-specific links.

Within ChannelCrawler’s curated catalogue of around 3,800 known brands, the report found 3.05 million brand-mention videos and 3.65 million brand associations in Q1. Most brand visibility was organic, with 82.8% of associations classified as organic mentions. However, the commercial layer is substantial: declared ads and likely sponsored mentions generated approximately 18.8 billion views in the quarter.

One of the clearest findings is that declared sponsorships only show part of the picture. Likely sponsored mentions generated 13.77 billion views, almost three times the reach of declared ads. For marketers, this means competitor activity may be much broader than what is visible through obvious “paid partnership” language alone.

The report also shows that brand activity is not concentrated only among mega creators. Channels with 500–100k subscribers account for 86.9% of brand-mention activity, making smaller and mid-sized creators a major part of the YouTube brand visibility landscape. At the same time, established channels dominate overall activity: channels created in 2021 or earlier account for 82.6% of brand-mention videos and 82.4% of brand-mentioning channels.

For brands and agencies, this creates a clear opportunity. The next advantage on YouTube will not only come from working with the biggest creators. It will come from finding relevant creators before they are saturated with brand deals, understanding which creators are already commercially validated, and giving them a simple reason to talk about you.

The key takeaway is simple: YouTube brand visibility is already happening at massive scale, but the market is still far from saturated. The teams that can understand who is being mentioned, where, by whom, how often and in what context will be better placed to benchmark competitors, spot whitespace, identify validated creators and build more effective sponsorship and affiliate strategies.

Why this matters now

YouTube is no longer a side channel in creator marketing. It now sits at the intersection of mass reach, living-room viewing, podcast consumption, and product research.

In the US, 84% of adults use YouTube.¹ 73% of teens use it daily.² TV is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the US.³ In January 2026, Nielsen said YouTube accounted for 12.5% of all US TV viewing.⁴

YouTube also says it now has more than 1 billion monthly active viewers of podcast content,⁵ while Edison found 32% of US weekly podcast consumers use it most often for podcasts.⁶

This is not just a scale story. It is a decision-making story. Google cites Kantar research showing YouTube is the No. 1 platform for purposeful viewing in the US,⁷ and that 82% of US viewers say it has the most trusted creators.⁸

Google also cites Material research saying YouTube cuts the average online video shopper’s journey by six days.⁹ And this is before we even get started on the fact that it is the number 1 citation source for LLMs.

That is why sponsorship visibility matters more now. When a platform plays such a large role in attention, trust, and product discovery, sponsorship activity becomes one of the clearest signals of what is actually happening in the market. It shows which brands are active, which creators are commercially validated, and where competition is building.

The problem is that most teams still do not have a clean view of that activity. YouTube sponsorship research is often pieced together manually across channels, videos, creators, and categories. That makes it harder to benchmark competitors, justify creator choices, or monitor how a market is shifting. The teams that can see more clearly will move faster and with more confidence.

Methodology note

This report analyses brand visibility by calculating the amount of links in video descriptions across YouTube in Q1 (January 1st 2926 - March 31st 2026), using data from our 23 million Youtube channel database. We excluded channels with 500 or less subscribers.

To focus the analysis on identifiable brand and sponsor activity, we reviewed external URLs associated with YouTube content and excluded generic platform, social, messaging, creator-support and marketplace links that do not usually represent a distinct brand sponsor or commercial partner.

In total, 70 domains were excluded from the analysis. This included major social and creator platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Twitch, Reddit, Patreon, Linktree and Spotify, as well as broad e-commerce and marketplace domains including Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, eBay, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, AliExpress and common merch platforms.

The aim was to reduce noise from standard creator links, social profiles, storefronts and generic marketplaces, so the report could better highlight meaningful brand visibility, sponsorship patterns and competitive activity on YouTube. Data should be treated as a directional view of the YouTube brand visibility rather than a complete record of every sponsorship or brand mention.

Brand visibility on YouTube is already happening at huge scale

In Q1 2026, 13.6 million YouTube videos mentioned a brand.

Across the quarter, we analysed 144,836,651 videos from 7,565,692 eligible YouTube channels. Of those, 13,605,458 videos included at least one brand mention, meaning 9.4% of all videos in the dataset referenced a brand.

That might sound like a small percentage, but at YouTube scale, it represents a massive volume of brand activity. Those 13.6 million videos resulted in BILLIONS of views.

The brand footprint is broad, not concentrated

The analysis identified 213,417 distinct brands and 5,463,437 distinct URLs across the dataset.

That works out at an average of 26 URLs per distinct brand.

This matters because brand visibility on YouTube is rarely limited to a single homepage link or one neat campaign URL. Brands often appear through different landing pages, affiliate links, regional domains, tracking URLs, product pages, campaign pages and creator-specific links.

For marketers, this makes YouTube visibility harder to measure manually. A brand’s footprint can be spread across thousands of videos, creators, URLs and formats.

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