How to find every unanswered comment on your YouTube channel

If you have been uploading for a few years, there are comments on your channel you have never seen. Not because you ignored them: YouTube simply never puts them in front of you again once they scroll out of the notification feed.

When I first counted on my own channel, 155 top-level comments had no reply from me, spread across videos going back three years. Some were questions I would have loved to answer. One was a viewer politely pointing out a mistake in a Terraform video that thousands of people had watched since.

This post covers the three ways to find those comments, from slowest to fastest.

Why YouTube makes this hard

YouTube Studio's Comments page does have a Response status: Unresponded filter (YouTube's help page on it), and it works across the channel. What it gives you is one long scrolling list, sorted by relevance or by newest. It does not tell you how many comments are waiting, which videos they are on, or how far back they go, and each reply is typed into Studio's small box from scratch. For a handful of comments that is fine. For a backlog across 200 videos it is where most creators give up.

There is also no notification for "someone asked a question three weeks ago and nobody replied". Notifications are for new activity, so a comment you missed on the day stays missed.

Method 1: the Studio filter, video by video

This works, and it costs nothing.

1. Open YouTube Studio and go to Content.
2. Open a video and click Comments in its left menu.
3. Click the filter bar and choose Response status → I haven't responded.
4. Reply, then move to the next video.

The filter is accurate for the video you are on. The cost is time: for a channel with more than about 30 videos it becomes an afternoon, and you have to repeat it every few weeks because new comments land on old videos all the time.

Tip: sort your Content list by views and audit the top 20 videos first. On most educational channels those carry the majority of the questions.

Method 2: the Comments page with a search

On the channel-wide Comments page in Studio, the filter bar has the same Response status option, and it applies across all your videos, Shorts and posts. This is the quickest free way to see unanswered comments (every Studio comment filter and setting, with screenshots). Its limits: it is a single scrolling list with no count and no per-video view, sorted by relevance or newest, so old comments on quiet videos sit at the bottom of a very long scroll. It surfaces recent unanswered comments well and older ones unreliably. Use it for a weekly sweep, not a full audit.

Method 3: the YouTube Data API, the way ReplyDial does it

The only way to see the whole channel at once is the official YouTube Data API. The logic is simple, and I am spelling it out because anyone with a bit of code can do it:

1. Call commentThreads.list with allThreadsRelatedToChannelId set to your channel id and order=time. This returns every top-level comment on every video on the channel, newest first, 100 per page.
2. For each thread, check whether any reply's authorChannelId is your channel. If it is, you have answered it. If the thread has more replies than the API included inline, fetch them with comments.list before deciding, or you will mark answered threads as unanswered.
3. Skip your own top-level comments.
4. Page until you reach the oldest comment.

That is exactly what ReplyDial runs when you open its inbox. On my channel the full scan finds those 155 comments in about a minute, and each API page costs one quota unit, so a whole-channel audit is cheap.

If you would rather not write code, ReplyDial does it for you (free for 7 days, no card), and drafts a reply for each one that you can edit before posting. It is a web app, so it works from a phone: sign in with Google, connect the channel, and every reply is a few taps.

What to do once you have the list

Finding the comments is the easy half. A few things I learned working through mine:

• Answer the old ones anyway. A reply on a three-year-old video notifies the commenter, and it is visible to everyone who watches that video from now on. Old videos on educational channels get most of their views long after upload.
• Prioritise questions and corrections. Thanks and praise can wait; someone asking "does this still work in 2026?" is deciding whether to trust your video right now.
• Do not paste the same reply everywhere. Repetitive replies are the classic spam signal in YouTube's policies. Write each one for the comment.
• Turn the asks into videos. Roughly one in ten of my unanswered comments was a request for a video or a correction. That is a content plan written by the audience.

Summary

Method	Whole channel?	Time for 200 videos	Cost
Studio filter, per video	No, one video at a time	Hours	Free
Studio Comments page, "Unresponded" filter	Yes, as one scrolling list, no counts or dates	Minutes to find, hours to answer	Free
YouTube Data API / ReplyDial	Yes	About a minute	Free (API quota)

If you only do one thing: audit your top 20 videos with the Studio filter this week. If you want the whole channel, use the API, or let ReplyDial run it for you. And once you have the list, this is the weekly routine that keeps it at zero; if you are wondering whether it is worth the effort, here is what ignoring it cost me. Each API read costs quota; the quota cost table and our quota calculator show how far 10,000 units a day goes.