vidIQ's screenshots showed a new item labelled NEW in the left-hand menu of YouTube Studio, followed by another YouTuber's profile with channel analytics. A creator releases unique viewers and audience demographics to advertisers only by ticking a box. According to a YouTube spokesperson, only public information that was already available in the Creator Partner Hub went into the test with brands. A test of the feature, which YouTube called Channel Search according to vidIQ as cited by Tubefilter, brought creator data into the Studio of a small number of brand channels, the YouTube spokesperson confirmed.
vidIQ published the screenshots on 5 October 2026 on X, commenting that YouTube appeared to be slowly rolling out a new tab in Studio. The menu item is called Creator discovery. It sits between Analytics and Community. The screenshots show the profile of YouTuber Sambucha with the number of unique viewers over the last 28 days. Below the row showing the creator's starting price (Creator cost) is a Business email field containing an email address. In its videos section, the profile has a Brand deals videos tab.
According to the YouTube spokesperson, such profiles were meant to be visible exclusively to brand channels. In one case, however, an entity that was not a brand gained access to Channel Search. YouTube denied that the feature was meant to become a tool in which creators compare themselves with peers. The data shown belonged, according to the spokesperson, to creators who had agreed to share it.
According to YouTube, public data includes, for example, the channel name, subscriber count and views. Unique viewers and audience age, gender and geography are available to the creator in YouTube Analytics. A checkbox in the channel's advanced settings turns on channel insights sharing, but does not always turn it off.
With the checkbox, the creator also releases engagement rate and average views per video, metrics that Google, in the documentation for its advertising API, calls “non-public” and returns only with the creator's consent. The checkbox for sharing channel insights, under Settings > Channel > Advanced settings, is available in Studio on desktop to creators in the YouTube Partner Program worldwide, except for Official Artist Channels.
Since June 2026, Czech companies can also search for Partner Program creators. Every active account registered in a country with the Partner Program received the basic Creator Partnerships features in Google Ads, including the Creator Search tool. Czechia is on the list of markets. Only creators from supported countries have the Creator Partnerships tab in Studio, where a creator sets their desired price and business contact. From the European Union, these are creators from France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. Czechia is not among them.
A creator catalogue in Google Ads
The Creator Partnerships tab belongs to the renamed BrandConnect programme, which YouTube unveiled in March 2026 as a single platform connected to creators' Studio and advertisers' Google Ads. According to YouTube, it opens up more than 3 million creators in the Partner Program to brands. The Gemini model helps search among them. Audience and performance filters in Creator Search exclude creators who have not turned on channel insights sharing.
Creators with sharing turned on appeared on average 60% more often in brands' search results, YouTube claims, based on its own US data for October to December 2025. For creators who previously signed the Creator Partnerships terms of service or completed third-party verification in YouTube Analytics, insights will continue to be shared under those terms even if they turn sharing off.
The same insights reach only selected platforms through the Creator Partnerships API, with no self-serve access for brands and agencies. Fabulate is among the first. According to Net Influencer, the API is meant to reduce brands' reliance on estimated creator metrics and third-party audience assumptions. Fabulate co-founder Nathan Powell described the practice so far in one sentence: “Brands have been forced to stitch together audience data and reporting from multiple places.”
A creator can also give a brand access to a report on how the partnership performed. At Made On YouTube in September 2026, YouTube announced a one-click code with which a creator, after publishing a sponsored video, lets the brand see its performance. The brand can then back the video with paid advertising through Creator Partnerships boost.
Channel Search and data from the platform
People in the industry were already assessing performance and audience data supplied to brands by the platform itself in July 2025, when YouTube began offering creators channel insights sharing. The head of Amaze said at the time that brands want more access. According to him, YouTube wants them to spend more on advertising. The line “Platform-reported data, while helpful, isn’t neutral; it’s designed to validate the platform’s value.” comes from Taylor Miles of the agency twotango collaborative.
According to Tubefilter, Channel Search may not make it beyond the initial experiment on YouTube. YouTube pulled the test with the Creator discovery item after the access error, but an eligible creator can opt out of recommendations in brands' search only by emailing youtube-brandconnect-opt-out@google.com. Even a creator with the box unticked can remain findable for advertisers through public channel data.
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