YouTube Description Writer

The first two lines are the only part most people read

YouTube allows a description of 5,000 characters. It shows roughly the first 150 before the "…more" link, and that same opening is what appears under your video in search results.

So the description has two jobs and they need separating. The first two lines have to say what the video is and give someone a reason to keep watching — that is the part that is actually read. Everything after the fold is for the people who came looking for something specific: the links, the timestamps, the credits, the affiliate disclosure, the keywords that help YouTube understand the video.

The common mistake is spending those 150 characters on "Welcome back to my channel! Don't forget to like and subscribe." That is a sentence that could sit on any video ever made, occupying the only space guaranteed to be seen.

Chapters have rules, and missing one gives you plain text

This is the most useful thing on this page, because chapters are the single biggest improvement you can make to a description and they fail silently.

YouTube turns your timestamps into clickable chapters only when all three of these are true:

The first timestamp is 0:00. Not 0:05, not 0:01. If the list does not begin at zero, you get no chapters at all.

There are at least three timestamps. Two is not enough, however long the video is.

Every chapter lasts at least 10 seconds. One section that runs from 1:20 to 1:25 breaks the whole set, not just that entry.

Get all three right and the progress bar splits into named segments, the chapters appear as a list under the video, and they can show up in search results as jump-to links. Get one wrong and your carefully written timestamps sit there as ordinary text. There is no error message and nothing tells you it failed — you just have to look at the video and check.

Write them one per line as 0:00 Introduction, and use h:mm:ss once the video passes an hour.

Your first three hashtags show above the title

A smaller fact with a real consequence. YouTube pulls the first three hashtags out of the description and displays them above the video title, where they are prominent and clickable.

So the first three are a placement decision rather than a keyword dump. Pick three that describe the video accurately and that you would be happy appearing above the title, and leave anything speculative further down. More than fifteen hashtags in a description makes YouTube ignore all of them.

Switch the sections on — they all start off

The Include options begin unchecked, so choose what the description should contain rather than expecting a default.

Hook and Main description are the two to keep on almost always — they are the part above and just below the fold. Chapters is worth turning on for anything over about five minutes with distinct sections, and it needs the timestamps in the field. Links section is where your other videos, your site and any gear or affiliate links belong. Subscribe CTA is fine at the bottom, which is the only place it should be. Hashtags gives you a set, remembering that the first three surface above the title.

Fill in the other fields properly too. The keywords go into the body, which helps YouTube work out what the video covers. The channel niche shapes the vocabulary, since the same tutorial written for beginners and for professionals should not sound the same.

What it does not do

It does not watch your video. The timestamps you supply are taken on trust — nothing checks that 4:32 is really where that section begins, so verify them against the video before publishing, because a chapter list that is thirty seconds out is worse than none.

It does no keyword research either. Search volume, competition and what is currently ranking need real data, which is what vidIQ, TubeBuddy and keyword tools are for.

And there is a practical ceiling on length: a description filling all 5,000 characters may come back cut short. That is rarely a problem, because a description nobody reads to the end gains you nothing — but if you need an exhaustive one, generate the structure here and extend it yourself.

Unlike the file tools on ToolsHall, this one sends your input to a language model rather than running in your browser. No account, and no limit beyond 30 runs an hour.

Related tools

YouTube Title Generator handles the title, and shows each option's character count against the length that survives truncation. Hashtag Generator builds a proper tag set, and Social Media Caption Writer writes the post when you share the video elsewhere.