Guide

How to see all the comments on a YouTube video

On a video with thousands of comments, YouTube shows you a few dozen and quietly forgets the rest as you scroll. Here is why, and how to get the whole comment section in one place.

The short version

  1. Paste the video URLA normal watch link, a youtu.be short link, a Shorts link or a bare video ID all work.
  2. Let it loadComments arrive in pages of a hundred with a live counter. Replies that come with each thread arrive at the same time.
  3. Stop when you have enoughA Stop button ends the load and keeps everything collected so far. On very large videos it pauses by itself after a big batch so one video cannot exhaust the shared daily allowance.
  4. Read, sort or exportSort by date, likes, replies or most recent reply. Everything on screen exports to CSV, Excel or JSON.
Open the tool

Why the comment section is never all there

YouTube uses infinite scroll: it renders a batch, and as you move down it loads more and discards what is now far above you. That keeps a page with fifty thousand comments from crushing your browser, and it is the right trade-off for watching a video. It is the wrong one for reading the comments.

The practical effects are the ones people run into: your browser’s find function searches only what is rendered, you cannot select and copy the section, and scrolling to the bottom of a busy video is a job rather than a gesture.

Loading the whole set

The public YouTube Data API returns comments in pages of a hundred. ClearComments requests those pages one after another until the video is exhausted, keeps the result in your browser’s memory, and shows a running count while it works. Replies that arrive alongside their parent thread are included at no extra cost.

You are in control of when it stops. There is a Stop button throughout, and after a large batch the load pauses on its own and asks whether to continue — the daily API allowance is shared by everyone using the site, so one very large video does not get to spend all of it without being asked.

Why the total may not match YouTube Studio

Studio’s comment count includes things the public API does not return, so the two numbers rarely agree exactly. The usual reasons:

  • Comments held for review, which only the channel owner sees when signed in.
  • Comments YouTube already classified as likely spam, filed away out of public view.
  • Comments from accounts that were since removed or terminated.
  • Replies on very long threads, which are fetched only when you open the thread.

None of that is a bug in the tool or in Studio. It is the difference between what is public and what is yours alone to see, and no public tool can cross that line.

What to do once it is all loaded

Search by keyword across everything at once. Filter to comments carrying a review signal, to a single author, to a date range, or to comments long enough to be worth reading. Sort by Recent Replies to see which conversations are still alive. Or take the lot away as a spreadsheet.

Try it

Open ClearComments and paste a video link. Free, no account, nothing uploaded. To do the same across an entire channel, see searching every comment on a channel.

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