See any YouTube video’s category and tags in one paste.
Paste a URL, get the YouTube category, every tag the uploader set, channel, upload date, duration, view count, and a description preview. Free, no signup, no YouTube API key.
1
Paste the YouTube URL
Drop any youtube.com/watch?v=…, youtu.be/…, or youtube.com/shorts/… link. You can also paste just the 11-character video ID.
2
Click Check category
The tool fetches the public watch page server-side, parses the embedded microformat, and pulls out every meta field. No YouTube API key, no quota, no signup.
3
Read the results
You get the category, every tag (with one-click copy), channel name, upload date, duration, view count, live/Short flags, thumbnail, and a description preview.
The 15 YouTube categories
YouTube freezes uploads to one of fifteen fixed categories. The list hasn’t changed since 2012, even though the platform’s content mix has. That’s why “Entertainment” and “People & Blogs” became catch-all buckets for anything that didn’t fit cleanly elsewhere.
Two videos with identical titles and identical tags can rank very differently if one is in “Education” and the other is in “Entertainment”. Category feeds into the recommendation engine’s topic clustering, into which suggested videos appear in the sidebar, and into the ad inventory the upload competes for.
For channel growth audits, the first thing worth checking on an underperforming video is whether its category is sensible for the content. A finance explainer in “People & Blogs” will struggle against the same explainer in “Education” or “News & Politics” simply because the wrong audience is being recommended it.
How the tag extraction works
Every YouTube watch page includes a <meta name="keywords"> tag containing the comma-separated list of tags the uploader set in YouTube Studio. We fetch the page server-side, parse that element, and return the list in original order. No inference, no LLM, no fake suggestions.
For category, we look at the embedded ytInitialPlayerResponse JSON YouTube includes near the top of the HTML. The microformat block inside has a category field, exactly what YouTube’s own apps read.
Frequently asked questions
What is a YouTube video category?
Every uploaded video is assigned to one of 15 fixed categories: Music, Gaming, Education, Entertainment, and so on. The uploader picks it at publish time. The category affects which feed sections recommend the video, which ad policies apply, and how YouTube Search ranks the upload for ambiguous queries.
Why doesn't YouTube show the category directly?
The category lives in the video's metadata but is not shown anywhere on the public watch page UI, only in the underlying microformat JSON YouTube embeds in the HTML. This tool reads that embedded JSON so you don't need to crack open DevTools.
Are the tags real or guessed?
Real. The tags come from the <meta name="keywords"> element YouTube emits on every watch page. These are the exact tags the uploader set, in the order they set them. We do not infer or generate tags.
Can I check my competitors' videos?
Yes. Paste any public YouTube URL. You see the same data Google Search and YouTube's own ranker see when deciding where to place the video.
Does this work for Shorts?
Yes. Shorts URLs (youtube.com/shorts/…) resolve to the same metadata. The category for Shorts is usually whatever the channel's default category is unless the uploader changed it for that specific upload.
What about private, unlisted, or members-only videos?
No. This tool only reads the public watch page. Private, age-gated, region-locked, and members-only videos won't resolve. For those you would need to sign in to YouTube and view the metadata in YouTube Studio directly.
Is anything stored or logged?
The URL you paste is sent to our API to fetch the watch page server-side. The fetched HTML is parsed and discarded; the only thing logged is the category name itself, for aggregate stats. We do not store URLs, tags, or any personally identifying data.
Why am I getting "category not found"?
Either the video is private/removed, region-blocked from our server (rare, but happens for music videos with strict licensing), or YouTube served a non-standard page (login wall, captcha). Try again in a minute; if it persists, the video is most likely not publicly accessible.
