Competitor Radar

Competitor Radar tracks the channels you care about and surfaces their over-performing uploads, the ones actually breaking out relative to the channel’s own baseline. Every outlier can be opened for an AI-explained breakdown of why it worked, so you can adapt the pattern to your own videos.

What it is

A four-step research workflow that runs on-demand, not in the background:

Watchlist: add up to your plan’s cap of competitor channels via niche-matched suggestions or direct paste.
Scan: fan out across the watchlist, pull each channel’s recent uploads, and compute every video’s ratio against the channel’s trailing-10 median.
Outliers: videos with a 2×+ ratio are flagged. Filter by tier, sort by breakout multiple, views, or recency.
Insights: open any outlier for a four-axis AI breakdown: title hook, thumbnail motif, first-30s beat, and topic angle.

Nothing runs on a schedule. You trigger scans when you want signal, and insight generation is opt-in per video.

Who should use it

New creators studying the top 5-10 channels in their niche.
Established channels looking for angles without doom-scrolling YouTube.
Content teams and creators-with-editors who want everyone reviewing the same board.
Agencies managing multiple client channels, watching the same rivals across accounts.

How to use it

Open Competitor Radar

From your dashboard sidebar, go to Content Planning → Competitor.

Add your first competitor

Click Add competitor. You get two tabs:

Suggested: a personalised shortlist ranked to your channel. We combine your niches (declared + auto-classified from recent uploads), your subscriber size, and your primary language, so a 20K Hindi finance creator sees 5K-100K Hindi finance channels, not MrBeast. Tick the channels you want and add them in one go.
Paste URL: supports @handle, UC channel IDs, or a full channel/video URL. We resolve it to the underlying channel automatically.

If the Suggested list is empty (our pool has no coverage for your niches yet), hit Find channels for me. We run a live YouTube search for your niches, add the top matches to the shared pool, and the list populates in a few seconds.

Competitor tracking only uses publicly-available channel data. No OAuth is required for the channels you track, and they’re never notified you added them.

Run a scan

Click Scan now. Every tracked channel is refreshed in parallel, recent uploads are pulled, the trailing-10 baseline is recomputed, and every upload’s ratio is stored. Scans usually finish in a few seconds regardless of watchlist size.

A toast confirms how many channels were scanned and how many outliers were found in the last 30 days. If some outliers fall outside your current date filter, the toast will nudge you to widen it.

Review outliers

The Outliers tab lists every video with a 2×+ ratio against its own channel’s baseline. Each card shows:

Thumbnail, title, and channel avatar.
Views, publish date, and the breakout multiplier (e.g. 3.2×).
Tier badge: Notable (2×+), Strong (3×+), or Hot (5×+).
An Explain this button that opens the AI insight modal.

Filter the list by tier (Notable / Strong / Hot), date window (7d / 30d / 90d), and sort by ratio, views, or recency.

Generate an insight

Click Explain this on any outlier card. If an insight for this video has already been generated, it loads instantly.

Otherwise you’re prompted to confirm the AI credit spend. Confirm and the job runs in the background; you’ll get a bell notification (and a push, if enabled) when it’s ready. Typical insights complete in 30-90 seconds depending on video length.

Read the four cards

The insight modal shows one card per axis:

Title hook: the framing pattern behind the title (contrarian, insider, superlative, list, question).
Thumbnail motif: composition hypothesis based on what the AI can infer from the transcript context.
First-30s beat: cold-open structure, whether it front-loads the payoff, the promise-to-reveal cadence.
Topic angle: where this positions in the niche (contrarian take, taboo topic, insider view, superlative claim).

Each card ends with a takeaway you can carry into your own scripting.

How outliers are picked

Every scan pulls each tracked channel’s 15 most recent uploads and computes the median view count of the last 10 (excluding the newest one, which is still gaining views). Any upload where views / baseline ≥ 2 is flagged.

Three tiers, colour-coded on the outlier card:

Notable: ratio 2×-2.99×. Worth a look.
Strong: ratio 3×-4.99×. Clear breakout.
Hot: ratio 5×+. Study this one.

The baseline is per channel. A 200K-view video is a hit on a small channel and a flop on a huge one, normalising against the channel’s own median catches actual breakouts, not just big channels having a big day.

The four AI insight axes

Every insight is structured around four constrained questions, specific enough that the answers are actionable, not generic:

Title hook: pattern, framing device, word count, first-word emphasis, curiosity gap.
Thumbnail motif: composition, focal element, colour accent, overlay text style, inferred from the video’s context.
First-30s beat: cold-open structure, whether it teases the payoff, cut cadence, chapter markers.
Topic angle: positioning play (contrarian, insider, superlative, taboo, list-of-N).

Each card includes a one-sentence takeaway you can apply directly.

Regenerating an insight

Every insight modal has a Regenerate button. Use it when you want a fresh AI pass on the same video, useful if the previous run felt off or you want a second opinion. Regeneration consumes AI credits from your workspace pool and replaces the existing insight.

Adding a competitor

Three input formats are accepted in the Paste URL tab:

Handle: @enhancetube or just enhancetube.
Channel ID: UCxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
URL: a full YouTube channel URL, or even a video URL (we resolve to the channel).

Duplicate protection is built in, adding a channel you’re already tracking is a silent no-op.

Limits and plans

Watchlist size: plan-level cap on how many channels you can track simultaneously. Remove old ones to make room for new ones.
Insight generation quota: monthly cap on how many new insights your workspace can trigger. Revisiting an insight you already generated doesn’t count.
Scan rate limit: 30 scans per day, per workspace. The same generous cap applies on every plan.
AI credits: generating a fresh insight consumes credits from your workspace’s AI credit pool. Revisiting an insight you already generated doesn’t recharge.

See Plans & Pricing for current watchlist and insight allowances, and AI Credits for the credit model.

Retention

Watchlist: stays until you remove a competitor manually. There’s no auto-expiry.
Insights: kept in your workspace’s insights history. If a competitor privates or deletes a source video, insights you’ve already opened remain readable.
Scan results: each scan refreshes the outlier board with the latest data. You always see the current state, not a running history of previous scans.

Troubleshooting

“Couldn’t find that channel”: the handle or URL didn’t resolve to a public channel. Try the UC-prefixed channel ID from the channel’s About page.
“You’ve hit your watchlist cap”: you’re at your plan’s max. Remove a competitor to add a new one, or upgrade.
“No outliers this run”: a scan completed but nothing was 2×+ above baseline. That’s usually a healthy channel with consistent performance, try again in a week.
“Scan cooldown active”: you’re inside the per-minute cooldown between scans. Wait a moment and retry.
“Insight generation is at your monthly cap”: you’ve used your plan’s monthly quota for new insights. Insights you’ve already opened stay available; upgrade for more new generations.
“Transcription failed” / “Analysis failed”: a transient upstream error. Retry in a few minutes; credits for the failed attempt are refunded automatically.

FAQ

Do I need OAuth or manager access to a competitor’s channel?

No. Competitor data is limited to what any viewer can see on the channel page. We never touch private analytics, and competitors are never notified you’re tracking them.

Why is this on-demand instead of automatic?

Auto-tracking tends to surface signal you never act on, a firehose of daily notifications about videos that aren’t actually breaking out. On-demand scans put the trigger under your control, perfect for a weekly niche review or right before you script a new video, and every plan gets a generous 30-scans-per-day cap.

Can I search YouTube for channels I don’t already know?

Yes, sort of. The Suggested tab is a personalised shortlist for your niches. If it’s empty because our pool doesn’t cover your niches yet, click Find channels for me and we’ll run a YouTube search for your niches and add the top matches to the pool. Free-text keyword search (type any topic you want, get channels back) is on the roadmap. For known handles, the fastest path is still Paste URL.

What happens when a competitor deletes or privates a video?

It quietly drops out of subsequent scans. If you’d already generated an insight for that video, it remains readable in your Insights history, useful for the analysis, even if the source is gone.

How is the trailing-10 baseline different from a moving average?

We use the median of the last 10 uploads (excluding the freshest). Medians are robust against a single previous viral hit skewing the baseline, an averaged baseline would misclassify normal uploads as outliers on the way down. The freshest upload is excluded because it hasn’t finished accruing views yet.

How much does one insight cost in AI credits?

Generating a fresh insight consumes a modest amount of credits from your workspace’s AI credit pool. Longer videos cost proportionally more than shorter ones. Every plan’s monthly insight quota is sized to comfortably cover a weekly review of a reasonable watchlist, see AI Credits for the full model.