Why ChatGPT puts asterisks in your YouTube description

Because YouTube's bold is a button, and ChatGPT can only type. That is the whole answer. The rest of this page is why that is true, how to fix it by hand in about a minute, and how to stop it happening again.

What you are seeing

You asked a chat assistant for a video description. In the chat window it looked right, with clean bold headings. You pasted it into YouTube Studio, published, and the description underneath your video reads **What you'll learn in this video** — asterisks and all.

Why it happens

Chat assistants write in Markdown. It is a convention for marking up plain text: two asterisks for bold, square brackets and parentheses for a link, a hash for a heading. It is not a YouTube thing, it is a writing-tools thing, and the model produces it by default because that is how it formats text everywhere.

YouTube descriptions do support bold, italic and strikethrough. That part surprises people. What they do not support is typing them. YouTube's own help text says to select bold, italicize, or strikethrough from the options at the bottom of the description box.

Formatting on YouTube is an action you take in the editor: you select the text and you click a control. Markdown is characters you type. A typed character is not a button press, so the characters stay characters.

The reason you did not catch it before publishing

The chat window renders the markdown. That is what markdown is for. So the asterisks are invisible in the exact place you are reading and copying from — you see bold text, and the characters producing it are hidden by the thing displaying them.

You cannot proofread this in the window you copy from. It only becomes visible after it is public, which is why so many people find out from a viewer's comment.

One thing that does survive, because we checked

It would be tidy to say markdown never works in a YouTube description. It is not true, and the exception is documented: bullet lists are triggered by an asterisk, plus or hyphen at the start of a line followed by a space.

So a markdown bullet list does become a real bullet list. Bullets are typed. Bold is clicked. If you remember one line from this page, that is the one.

Fixing it by hand

Whatever wrote your description, do this before you publish:

• —Delete every double-asterisk pair. If a line needs emphasis, select it in the description box and use YouTube's own bold control.
• —Unwrap bracketed links. Write the words, then put the bare URL on its own line. YouTube links bare URLs by itself.
• —Delete hash heading marks. Use capitals or a blank line instead — both are plain characters, so both survive.
• —Delete backticks. They have no meaning here at all.
• —Keep your hyphen bullets. Those work.

Then read the first couple of lines on their own, because those are what show before the "Show more" cut.

The part no tool can fix for you

No writing tool can produce YouTube bold. Not this one, not any of them. A language model emits text; YouTube's bold is a control in an editor, and nothing a model writes can press it.

So the correct output from any AI writing your description is clean plain text — and a tool that hands you markdown is not being fancier, it is handing you the cleanup job.

What packaged does about it

Your description is checked for markdown before you ever see it, and one carrying any is sent back for repair rather than handed to you. Five patterns are rejected: double-asterisk bold, double-underscore bold, hash headings, bracketed links and backtick code. The pinned comment is checked the same way.

The scope, because a claim true of three fields and written as four is false: this covers the description and the pinned comment. It does not cover the title, and a test asserts that so no page here can quietly widen it.

And it is the rule that is checked, not the symptom. A test writes the obvious wrong version — a check for the asterisk character — and proves it lets a bracketed link through untouched. The asterisk is what people complain about. It is not the rule.

Want this check to run before every paste? 100 free credits, no card. Start free.

What this page does not claim

• —We do not claim YouTube publishes your asterisks as a Google-confirmed fact. Google documents how formatting is applied; it does not document what a specific markdown string does after pasting. The mechanism is what is verified, and the mechanism is enough.
• —We do not claim chat assistants write bad descriptions. They write good ones, in a format built for a different window.
• —We do not claim this affects ranking or views. It affects whether your description reads as finished.
• —We do not claim to check your title for this. The description and the pinned comment.