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 is built around recent comments. It shows the newest first, mixes answered and unanswered together, and its "I haven't responded" filter is applied per video. To audit a channel with 200 videos you would open 200 videos.

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 a Response status option too, but it applies to the list you are looking at, which is limited to what YouTube chooses to show and is capped in how far back it pages. In my testing 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, the free beta does it for you, and drafts a reply for each one that you can edit before posting.

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	Recent comments only	Minutes	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.