Auto-Chapters
Auto-Chapters reads your video’s transcript, finds where each topic starts, and writes chapter titles. You review and edit them next to the video, then publish them into your YouTube description in one click. Once they are live, you can see how each chapter holds viewers.
What you get
- Chapters at the exact second. Each chapter starts on the caption line where the new topic begins, not on a rough grid.
- The whole video, however long. Long videos and podcasts (up to 3 hours) are read in full, piece by piece, so chapters cover the end as well as the start. The number of chapters follows the video’s length.
- Titles in your video’s language, worded the way you choose:
- Search-friendly: worded like what viewers search, using the search terms that already bring people to this video (from your YouTube Analytics) and YouTube’s search suggestions. Helps Google show your chapters as key moments.
- Plain: short topic names.
- Spoiler-free: never gives away the answer, the winner or the reveal. For list, ranking and reveal videos, where viewers who see the result in the chapter list skip ahead.
- Phrases you choose, used in a title where that part of the video is about them.
How to use it
Pick a video
Go to SEO Tools → Auto-Chapters and click Generate chapters. Pick the video, then choose how many chapters, the title style and language, and any phrases to use.
Review
Play the video next to the list, jump to any chapter, edit times and titles, add or remove chapters.
Publish
Publish to YouTube puts the chapters at the top of your description, or replaces a chapter list that is already there (written as 0:00 Intro, (0:00) Intro, ▶ 0:00 Intro, - 0:00 - Intro and similar). Everything else in your description stays as it is.
Change or remove them later
Edit the chapters and click Update on YouTube, or click Remove chapters: the chapters come out of the description, edits you made since stay, and a chapter list you had before comes back.
How each chapter holds viewers
After publishing, the review window shows, from your YouTube Analytics:
- the share of viewers still watching when each chapter starts, and the share it loses;
- the chapter with the biggest drop, and the chapters viewers jump to;
- average view percentage for the same number of days before and after the chapters went live.
YouTube Analytics runs about 2 days behind, so the before and after needs a few days and at least 100 views on each side. It is a comparison, not a test: traffic sources, the season and other changes move it too.
Many videos
- Older videos: click Chapter older videos, pick from your videos (by default, the ones without chapters), choose the options, and queue them. You can let them wait for your review, or publish them without review.
- New uploads (Pro plan): turn on Chapters for new uploads. About 3 hours after a public video goes live (captions take time), chapters are made for it and left for review, or published, as you choose. Videos that already have chapters are left alone.
These run in the background, a few each hour. A video without captions waits and is tried again the next day; background runs never pay for an AI transcription.
Limits and credits
- Each video uses one Auto-Chapters run from your plan (see Plans & Pricing). A run that fails gives it back.
- The AI part costs AI credits at cost: about 5 for a 10-minute video, 40 for an hour and 100 for three hours (more for languages like Hindi, which take more AI tokens).
- A video with no captions on YouTube can be transcribed by AI when you start it yourself. That costs about 120 credits a minute and works up to 60 minutes.
- Videos from 1 minute to 3 hours.
Good to know
- YouTube needs at least 3 chapters, the first at 0:00, each at least 10 seconds long. The review screen checks this before you publish.
- YouTube’s description limit is 5,000 bytes, not characters: Hindi and other non-Latin letters take 3 bytes each and emoji 4. If the chapters would push your description over, nothing is cut or changed. You are told by how much, so you can shorten the description or the chapters.
- Removing chapters works for 30 days after publishing. We keep your original description no longer than that.