Guide

How to find unanswered questions in your YouTube comments

Somewhere in a comment section, several people asked something reasonable and nobody replied. Answering them is the cheapest engagement a channel can buy, and the reason it does not happen is simply that finding them is hard.

The short version

  1. Load the video or channelQuestions are pulled from the comments already loaded, so start by loading them.
  2. Open the questions viewComments carrying a question are collected together, ranked so the ones the audience cared about come first.
  3. Check which have no repliesSort by reply count to separate the questions already answered from the ones still hanging.
  4. Answer on YouTubeEach one links straight to itself, so replying is one click away in the place it counts.
Open the tool

Why questions get lost

A question does not look different from any other comment. It is not sorted separately, not flagged, and not surfaced by “Top comments” unless it happened to collect likes. On a video with a few thousand comments, a good question posted on day three is invisible by day four.

Meanwhile the questions people ask are the closest thing a creator gets to free research: they say exactly what the video failed to explain, and often what the next one should be about.

Finding them

ClearComments picks out comments that read as questions across everything loaded, and ranks them so the ones with the most engagement come first. It works on the comments already in your browser, so opening it costs no additional API quota.

Detection is deliberate rather than clever: a question mark, or an opening that signals a question in several languages. That means it errs towards including things — a rhetorical “who even watches this?” will show up next to a genuine one. Reading the list is still enormously faster than scrolling the section.

Separating answered from unanswered

A question with replies has probably been handled, by you or by the audience. Sort by reply count and the ones sitting at zero rise to the top — those are the ones worth your time.

Two honest caveats. A reply does not prove a correct answer; other viewers guess. And a thread with many replies may have had the question answered somewhere in the middle, which only reading it will tell you.

What to do with the list

  • Answer the repeated ones publicly. If five people asked it, it belongs in the description or a pinned comment, not in five replies.
  • Keep the good ones. Export the list — a recurring question is a video.
  • Work newest first. A reply two days later reaches the person; two months later it reaches nobody.

Try it

Open ClearComments and load a video or channel. Free, no account, nothing uploaded.

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