# YouTube (/docs/integrations/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 [#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 [#set-it-up]

{/* setup-screenshot */}
<figure>
  <img src="/assets/screenshots/youtube/setup.png" alt="The YouTube settings page in Sift, showing connected accounts (account names redacted for the docs)." />
  <figcaption>YouTube settings in Sift - manage connected accounts here.</figcaption>
</figure>

Go to [Settings → Integrations → YouTube](https://app.getsift.ai/app/settings/integrations/) and:

1. **Sign in** with a Google account that owns or manages the channel.
2. **Pick the channel(s)** Sift should monitor.
3. **Pick a processing level** for each channel - full AI synthesis (default) or stats-only for high-volume channels.
4. **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 [#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 [#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 [#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.