How to Find YouTube Influencers: A Practical Guide

The Two Paths: Manual vs. Automated

When you’re just starting with YouTube influencer marketing, it’s natural to do everything yourself. You type in a few keywords, click through videos, open creator profiles, and drop promising channels into a spreadsheet. It works, until the campaign scales.

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Manual search gives you intuition, but it doesn’t scale. Once you need 50, 200, or 1,000 qualified influencers, the workflow becomes brittle and exhausting.

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Manual Ways To Find YouTube Influencers

Native YouTube Search

• Search keywords like “best email marketing tools” or “home gym review”.
• Sort by Views or Upload date to find active, relevant creators.
• Open each channel, check their About page, recent uploads, and comments.

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Pros: Free, great for building a feel for your niche.
Cons: Slow, subjective, hard to repeat or hand off to a teammate.

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Hashtags & Trending

• Explore hashtags such as #skincare, #saas, or #productivity.
• Look for creators who consistently post in your niche and engage with their audience.
• Check if they’ve done sponsored content before (#ad, #sponsored).

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Pros: Helps you spot proven promo partners.
Cons: Still highly manual; easy to miss mid‑tier creators.

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Google & Curated Lists

• Search phrases like “top meditation YouTube influencers UK”.
• Pull from existing lists, then manually vet channels for relevancy and authenticity.

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Pros: Fast way to get an initial batch.
Cons: Lists can be outdated; data quality varies.

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Scaling Up: Automated Discovery With an AI Computer Agent

Now imagine you describe your ideal creator once: niche, country, language, view ranges, minimum engagement. An AI computer agent then opens YouTube in a browser, runs searches, clicks into channels, reads public stats, and logs everything into your Google Sheet.

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Instead of you hopping between tabs, the agent:

• Runs keyword and hashtag searches across YouTube.
• Opens each promising channel, capturing subscribers, recent view counts, posting frequency, and contact info where available.
• Scores or tags channels based on your rules (e.g., “US, 20k–200k subs, ≥4% engagement”).
• Writes results into a structured spreadsheet your team can instantly start outreach from.

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Pros of AI‑driven search:

• Handles thousands of repetitive steps without getting tired.
• Repeatable: run the same playbook weekly to refresh your list.
• Transparent: every click and filter is visible and auditable.

Cons:

• You still need to define smart criteria (the agent isn’t your strategist).
• First run may need a bit of tuning to match your brand’s taste.

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The Hybrid Play That Wins

Use manual exploration to define what a “great” YouTube partner looks like for your brand. Then encode that into an AI computer agent workflow. Let the agent mine the internet; you keep the final yes/no call and the human conversations.

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