YouTube
Connect a YouTube channel to Sift to pull comments from your videos into the inbox and respond to them alongside every other community surface - Shorts, full-length videos, channel-wide, all in one place.
At a glance
| Inbound: Comments on your videos (top-level + replies) | ✅ |
| Inbound: Comments on YouTube Shorts | ✅ |
| Inbound: Held-for-review / likely-spam comments | ✅ separate moderation queue |
| Outbound: Reply to a comment | ✅ |
| Multi-channel per workspace | ✅ |
| Per-channel processing level (full AI vs stats-only) | ✅ |
| Auto-reply bots | ✅ |
| Live-stream chat | ❌ |
| Community posts | ❌ |
Set it up
Go to Settings → Integrations → YouTube and:
- Sign in with a Google account that owns or manages the channel.
- Pick the channel(s) Sift should monitor.
- Pick a processing level for each channel - full AI synthesis (default) or stats-only for high-volume channels.
- Assign each channel to a queue (optional) for routing.
You need owner or manager rights on each channel. Sift uses YouTube's Data API; quotas apply at the Google project level and are usually invisible, but flag high-volume channels during setup so we can plan.
What you can do
Reply to any comment from the inbox - Sift posts it back to YouTube as a reply on the same thread, attributed to whoever connected the channel.
Trigger workflows off any comment signal (sentiment, keyword, author, video). Route to the right team automatically. Apply auto-reply bots for FAQ patterns or off-hours acknowledgements.
For high-volume channels, each connected channel can be set to full AI synthesis (every comment gets sentiment, theme, language, routing applied) or stats-only (comments stored but skip the AI pass - useful when the volume is too high to route individually).
What Sift ingests
Once a channel is connected, every comment on every video - Shorts included - flows into the inbox as a new action. Both top-level comments and nested replies are threaded back to the video they're on, so an agent always sees the conversation in context.
- Top-level comments on any video on the channel
- Replies to comments (full thread reconstruction)
- Held-for-review and likely-spam comments surfaced from YouTube's moderation queue - useful when you want a human to make the call instead of letting YouTube auto-hide them
Each comment carries the author's channel, like count, and the video it belongs to, so you can filter and route on any of those.
Not supported today
- Comment moderation (delete, hide, pin, heart, mark as spam) - moderate from YouTube Studio; Sift's role is conversation, not enforcement.
- Live-stream chat: too high-throughput for the conversation model; out of scope.
- Community posts: not ingested. If your channel relies on Community posts as a customer surface, let us know.
- CSAT prompts after closing: YouTube doesn't expose the surface for sending a follow-up CSAT request to a commenter.