What to write in a YouTube description
, 5 min read
A faceless channel publishes on a schedule, which means the description gets written last, at speed, on the video you have already stopped caring about. This is the structure worth writing when that is the situation you are in.
What YouTube actually documents
Less than you would expect. YouTube's help page on adding a description says a description is info that shows below your video, and that descriptions have a limit of 5,000 characters. That is close to the whole of it.
It does not tell you how much shows before the "Show more" fold. It does not tell you what to write. Most advice about descriptions fills that silence with confident claims about ranking, and this page is not going to add to them.
The only structural decision that matters
A description is not one block of text. It is a short piece that is always visible and a long piece that almost nobody expands, and writing it as one thing is the mistake that costs you something real.
The opening line or two is what appears under your title in search results, in suggested videos, and above the fold on the watch page. Everything after it is for the person who has already decided to watch. So the first sentence carries the promise, and the rest carries the detail.
The template
- One sentence that is the promise. Not a greeting, not the channel name, not "in this video we will". The thing the viewer gets.
- Two or three short paragraphs of what is actually covered. Written in the words someone would use to search for it, because this is the part that gives the video its vocabulary.
- Chapters, if you have caption timings. Real timestamps only. A chapter list with invented times is worse than no chapter list.
- Links last, as bare URLs on their own lines. YouTube turns a bare URL into a link by itself. A stacked block of links at the top pushes your actual description below the fold.
The one formatting rule
Write plain text. YouTube descriptions do support bold and italic, but only as an action you take in the editor — you select the text and click a control. Markdown typed into the box stays as literal characters, which is why descriptions written by a chat assistant so often publish with asterisks in them.
This is worth its own page and has one: why ChatGPT puts asterisks in your YouTube description.
packaged writes this structure from your transcript — the opening line as its own job, the body underneath, chapters when your captions carry timings, and plain text throughout because that is the only thing that survives the paste. 100 free credits, no card.
Start freeWhat this page does not claim
- Not that any of this improves your ranking. Nobody outside YouTube knows how descriptions are weighted, and the people who say they do are guessing in a confident voice.
- Not that 125 characters is a documented cut-off. It is our working number and it is checkable on your own screen.
- Not that longer is better. The 5,000-character limit is a ceiling, not a target.