YouTube Sponsorship Tracker

Find every paid sponsorship in a YouTube video: which brand paid, when the ad read starts and ends, the promo code, the tracking link, and the exact words the creator said. Paste video links, or a channel to check its latest videos, and get structured sponsorship data back in about a minute per video.

What you get for each video

• Every sponsor read with start and end timestamps, so you can jump straight to the ad.
• The brand, spelled the way the sponsor spells it, even when the captions mishear it.
• The promo code and tracking link from the video description, such as SpagCoat or drinklmnt.com/huberman.
• Sponsor or affiliate, so paid ad reads are kept apart from affiliate-link product mentions.
• The ad read transcript, the creator's own words for each promotion.
• YouTube's "Includes paid promotion" flag, the video's view count, and an estimated sponsor spend.

Who uses it

• Influencer marketing agencies checking which brands a creator already works with before pitching a deal, by scanning the creator's channel.
• Brands tracking where competitors spend on creators, and which codes and offers they use.
• Sponsorship and podcast ad sellers building lists of active YouTube advertisers to prospect.
• Copywriters and marketers studying how top creators deliver ad reads.

Example

From a 2-hour Huberman Lab episode:

Time	Type	Brand	Link
13:12 to 14:21	sponsor	David	davidprotein.com/huberman
14:21 to 15:47	sponsor	Eight Sleep	eightsleep.com/huberman
42:53 to 44:07	sponsor	AG1	drinkag1.com/huberman
1:15:13 to 1:16:32	sponsor	LMNT	drinklmnt.com/huberman
1:35:23 to 1:37:02	sponsor	Function	functionhealth.com/huberman

The captions say "Element". The tracker reads the description and reports the brand correctly as LMNT.

Check a whole channel

Add a channel URL or @handle and the tracker checks the channel's most recent long videos, up to 30. Shorts are skipped. Scanning the three latest Huberman Lab episodes found 13 sponsor reads from 8 brands: AG1, David, Eight Sleep, Function, Helix Sleep, Lingo, LMNT and Mateina, each with its tracking link.

Ready-made examples

Open one, look at its results, then swap in your own videos or channels:

• Find a YouTube creator's recent sponsors
• Track sponsors across tech YouTube channels
• Track sponsors on science YouTube
• Get podcast sponsors, links and promo codes
• Find promo codes in YouTube sponsor reads
• Get sponsor timestamps for one YouTube video
• Find sponsors in Spanish-language YouTube videos

How it works

1. Captions and description. The actor reads the video's captions and its description, which usually lists the sponsor's exact name, link and promo code.
2. AI detection. An AI model finds every paid promotion spoken in the video, names the company as the sponsor spells it, and copies the link and code from the description.
3. Sponsor or affiliate. Each segment is marked sponsor when the company paid for that mention, or affiliate when the creator recommends a product with a referral or affiliate link. The creator's own merch, courses and memberships are left out.

The video itself is never downloaded, so a 60-minute video costs about the same as a 5-minute one.

Input

Field	Description
videoUrls	YouTube URLs or video IDs
channelUrls	Channel URLs or @handles. Each channel's most recent long videos are checked.
maxVideosPerChannel	How many recent videos to check per channel, from 1 to 30. Default 10.
sponsorCpmLow, sponsorCpmHigh	The range a sponsor pays per 1,000 views, used for the spend estimate. Default $20 to $50.
languages	Caption languages to try, in order. Default en.
proxyConfiguration	Datacenter proxy by default, with automatic residential retry when YouTube blocks a request.

Output

{
  "videoId": "o0O_fiH7CqU",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0O_fiH7CqU",
  "title": "This Was Way Harder Than It Looks",
  "channelName": "The Wood Whisperer",
  "channelId": "UC...",
  "hasTranscript": true,
  "transcriptStatus": "ok",
  "paidPromotion": true,
  "sponsors": "Carbon Method",
  "affiliates": "Titebond",
  "sponsorCount": 3,
  "viewCount": 119408,
  "estSponsorSpendLowUsd": 7164,
  "estSponsorSpendHighUsd": 17911,
  "promoCodes": "Carbon Method: SpagCoat",
  "adTimes": "Carbon Method 0:09–0:19; Titebond 17:54–18:06; Carbon Method 19:14–20:43; Carbon Method 24:55–25:39",
  "cached": false,
  "segments": [
    {
      "start": 1154, "end": 1246, "type": "sponsor",
      "brand": "Carbon Method", "promoCode": "SpagCoat",
      "link": "https://carbonmethod.com/benchnuts/?ref=mjguvwfm",
      "text": "Now at the top of the show, I mentioned our sponsor today is Carbon Method..."
    }
  ]
}

transcriptStatus is ok, unavailable when the video has no captions, or blocked when YouTube refused the request, which is worth retrying later. paidPromotion is YouTube's own "Includes paid promotion" flag. cached is true when the result was served from earlier processing of the same video. sponsors and affiliates list each video's brands in plain text, sponsorCount counts its paid sponsor reads, promoCodes lists each brand's code, and adTimes lists when each promotion starts and ends. viewCount is the video's views when it was processed.

Estimated sponsor spend. Sponsorship prices are private, so the tracker estimates them the way the industry quotes them: views ÷ 1,000 × a CPM, once per paid sponsor read. CPM is the price per 1,000 views. With the default $20 to $50 range, the example above, with 119,408 views and three Carbon Method reads, estimates $7,164 to $17,911. Treat it as a range, not a fact. Views keep growing after a deal is signed, and big creators often negotiate flat fees. Set your own CPM range for your niche. A link is returned only when its domain appears in the video description, and a promo code only when it appears in the description or the captions, so neither is ever made up. When the captions mishear a brand that the description lists, the description's spelling is used. When a sponsor isn't listed in the description, the brand is spelled from the captions and can be misspelled.

In Apify Console the results open as two tables: Sponsors by video, one row per video, and Every ad read, one row per promotion.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.025 per video processed, plus $0.03 per promotion found. A video is free when its captions could not be read.

For example, 100 videos that average one sponsor each cost about $5.50. Checking a channel's last 10 videos that average two sponsors each costs about $0.85.

How accurate is it?

We tested it on 40 videos uploaded in the same month, from 40 kinds of channel in six languages:

• It found 17 of the 18 paid ad reads that SponsorBlock users had labeled by hand.
• It found 6 more real ad reads that SponsorBlock users had never labeled.
• It flagged nothing on 20 videos with no ads.

A follow-up test of the current version on 24 of those videos, run three times:

• It captured the sponsor's tracking link in all 21 cases where the description listed one.
• It found the one ad read the first test missed, a product mention in the middle of a conversation, in every run.
• It still flagged nothing on videos with no ads.

FAQ

Does it download the video? No. It reads captions and the description, which is why it's fast and the same price for a 5-minute or a 3-hour video.

Are Shorts included? Not in channel scans, which check long videos only, since Shorts rarely carry sponsor reads. A Short you list directly under videoUrls is processed like any video.

Which languages work? Any language with captions on YouTube. Set languages to the caption languages you want, in order of preference. It has been tested in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Hindi.

What counts as a sponsor? A company that paid for the mention in that video. Affiliate-link product recommendations are returned with the type affiliate. The creator's own merch, courses and memberships are not included.

What if a video has no captions? The video comes back empty, transcriptStatus tells you why captions were missing, and you are not charged.

Can I use it from my own code or an AI agent? Yes. Call it through the Apify API, the Apify client libraries, or Apify's MCP server from an AI assistant.

How is this different from a YouTube transcript scraper? A transcript scraper gives you the whole text, and you still have to find the ads, name the brands and match the codes. This gives you only the sponsorships, already structured.