People can now get answers from ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews without ever clicking through to a brand’s website. That’s giving marketing teams a reason to rethink how they get discovered by potential customers, and where YouTube fits in.
But getting results on YouTube takes more than starting a channel and posting videos consistently. You’re competing with creators that have spent years learning what gets people to click and keep watching.
In this conversation, Vireo Video founder Marlon Doll shares what brands should prioritize on YouTube heading into 2027. Drawing on client work, he explains how to build an audience, improve existing videos, and connect your content strategy to business goals.
The key takeaways:
- Build an audience on YouTube. Create useful videos that answer your customers' questions and give them a reason to spend time with your brand.
- Learn from creators. Strong topics, titles, thumbnails, and storytelling all help your videos earn attention.
- Build a content library. Publish consistently and create related videos that give viewers something to watch next.
- Look beyond subscriber count. Pay attention to whether people click, keep watching, and find your content useful.
- Revisit existing titles and thumbnails. Videos that hold viewers' attention but get few clicks may benefit from better packaging.
- Balance specific topics with broader appeal. Answer your core audience's questions while giving new viewers a way into your content.
Watch the conversation below, or keep reading for the examples and advice behind each takeaway.
Looking for an expert YouTube Agency? Get in touch today. 
Why are brands turning to YouTube now?
The short answer: AI is eating their organic traffic. Not just blog traffic, but organic visits to their whole website.
People aren’t just searching on Google anymore. They’re using LLMs like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews, and they’re clicking through to blog posts and websites far less often.
Instead, they’re getting answers from the AI itself, or from the sources it cites. And YouTube is one of the top cited sources in Google’s AI Overviews.
Brands are noticing, and they’re recognizing YouTube as one of the strongest ways left to reach their core audience.
There’s a second reason too: depth. Someone might spend 10 or 20 minutes watching one of your videos. A social post or an ad gets a few seconds.
Long-form video lets you go deeper with your audience. In those minutes, viewers hear from your experts, see how you think, and start to trust you. That kind of relationship is much harder to build on other platforms.
How does YouTube show up in AI search?
YouTube is the number one source mentioned in Google’s AI Overviews. According to Ahrefs Brand Radar, youtube.com earned 21.1% of mentions among the top 10 domains in the US in July 2026, ahead of Reddit (18.5%) and Facebook (10.7%).
In other words, AI search treats YouTube as a source of quality information.
That gives brands a chance to control the narrative. If you create videos that answer the questions your customers are typing into LLMs, those videos can shape the AI’s answer or show up directly as a linked source, which happens especially often in Google search.
So what are AI engines actually looking at? In some cases they analyze visuals and screenshots from the video (Google does this), but the transcript and the title are some of the biggest factors.
Structure matters as well. AI engines weigh whether a video is scripted coherently, whether it’s a reliable source, and whether the person on camera comes across as a credible narrator.
Put simply, you can’t just hit record and hope for the best. (We go deeper on this in how to dominate AI search with YouTube, and on repurposing existing content in how to turn blog posts into YouTube videos for AI search.)
What's changed on YouTube for brands?
If a brand’s YouTube strategy hasn’t changed in the last couple of years, it’s probably falling behind. Three shifts stand out.
1. Mediocre how-to videos don't work anymore
Brands used to get away with basic, two-to-three minute how-to videos that didn’t put much thought into getting someone to click. Those videos would still pick up views over time.
Not anymore. YouTube is a competitive platform, and there’s probably already content out there covering whatever topic your brand wants to make a video about. Today, every video has to answer three questions:
- Packaging: Do my title and thumbnail capture someone's curiosity against every other option they could click?
- Script: Does it keep people watching for five to ten minutes, not dropping off in the first 30 seconds, so the algorithm is more likely to promote it?
- Value: Does the video actually deliver, so viewers are satisfied and YouTube decides the content is worth showing to more people?
The bar has risen. Brands need to meet it, and ideally go beyond it.
2. TV viewers are watching longer videos
More and more YouTube viewing is happening on TVs. In fact, TV has overtaken mobile as the primary device for YouTube viewing in the US (by watch time), according to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. The big change for brands is that people are watching for longer.
They’re sitting down on the couch to watch 30-minute videos the way they’d watch TV, not catching a quick clip between meetings at the office. As a result, longer videos tend to get surfaced more on TV. Shorts sometimes appear there too, but a vertical format isn’t ideal for a long-form viewing screen.
3. Shorts now get discovered in search
This is something we’re seeing in our own client data before most public commentary has caught up: Shorts are being surfaced significantly more than they were a year ago, both on the homepage and in search.
Historically, Shorts were mostly about entertainment or feeding the algorithm. They also had a very short lifespan: a Short would get a burst of views in its first few days, then fade away. They weren’t very evergreen.
Now, if there’s one niche question your audience is searching for that doesn’t justify a seven-to-fifteen minute video, a Short can be a great way to answer it and still get found.
How can brands compete with YouTube creators?
Brands and creators are playing with the same tools, but they each have different advantages.
Creators have a personal connection, because people tend to connect with an individual more than a company. YouTube is also their income, so they study the platform and take it extremely seriously. And they’re nimble: no stakeholder approvals, no legal reviews, just all their creativity poured into making one great video.
Brands have advantages of their own:
- Bigger budgets to hire YouTube strategists, not just an editor.
- Subject matter experts inside the company who really know their stuff and can present well on camera.
- Unique access to locations, people, or data that no creator can get.
Even so, we see creators with little to no budget going toe-to-toe with (and sometimes beating) brands with million-dollar content budgets. That’s because they put the time in, and great content finds its audience.
So brands need to ask: how can we create better content than the creators already covering this topic? That takes strategy, and it takes people who specialize in YouTube, whether that’s an in-house team or a YouTube marketing agency like ours.
Why consistency beats campaigns on YouTube
Brands tend to think in campaigns, launches, quarters, or halves of the year. YouTube rewards something different.
To succeed on YouTube, you need to put out content consistently. Quality matters even more than quantity, but a steady stream of videos is close to essential.
Here’s why: as your videos start building traction, they start referring viewers to each other. People watch one video, then move on to the next, building up watch time. That gives every video more opportunities to be discovered, and the snowball keeps rolling as the whole library grows.
A campaign ends. A content library keeps working.
Do YouTube subscribers still matter?
Not as much as most brands think. Subscribers are a vanity metric.
Sure, there’s some value there. Hitting 100K or a million subscribers gets you a silver or gold play button (we have a few at our office that we’re pretty proud of), and a big subscriber count can add credibility.
But it isn’t what keeps your content successful. A legacy channel can have a huge subscriber count and still not get views.
YouTube surfaces a video when it decides someone is likely to watch it, based on signals like click-through rate and audience retention. YouTube says its recommendations weigh what viewers click on, how long they watch, and how satisfied they are with what they watched. If people click and keep watching, YouTube gives the video more impressions. Meanwhile, subscribers don’t even see every video from the channels they follow.
So instead of chasing subscribers, focus on the metrics that actually drive distribution: click-through rate, average view duration, and retention.
Should every brand be on YouTube?
Yes. In many cases, YouTube is more valuable than a brand’s website.
People often spend more time on YouTube than they would on a website, and they arrive as warmer leads than someone skimming a sales page or an article.
For some brands, reaching an audience is harder. Their total addressable market might be small. But that’s okay. A brand targeting CTOs doesn’t need millions of views for YouTube to make sense.
Why do brand YouTube channels stop growing?
When brands first come to us, the most common problem is that they aren’t connecting with their target audience. Their organic views have flatlined.
Usually, that’s because they’ve pushed out content through ads, leaving a channel full of mixed videos that were never really made for a YouTube audience.
The brands getting YouTube right do things differently:
- They put YouTube first. Videos are made for YouTube, not repurposed as an afterthought.
- They use specialists. They either hire a dedicated YouTube team or work with an agency.
- They think like a media brand. Larger brands often run multiple channels with different purposes, each serving a different stage of the funnel.
- They borrow from creators. They apply the practices that work for creators and adapt them to the brand.
Case study: GitHub for Beginners
GitHub came to us with multiple departments creating content, and it wasn’t gaining much traction.
Looking at the channel, we found a major audience that was being underserved: beginner developers. So we ideated a series called GitHub for Beginners, built to give real value to people using GitHub for the first time or still early in their development journey.
It’s now GitHub’s most popular series. The first episode alone has more than 2.3 million views, and the full playlist has more than 4.3 million.
What's the highest-leverage fix for a brand channel?
The highest leverage fix is making better packaging: your titles and thumbnails.
Why packaging matters so much
It’s what people see before they decide to click, and we’d estimate it accounts for about 20–30% of a video’s chance of succeeding on YouTube.
The most common problem is that brands stick too tightly to their brand or design guidelines. Thumbnails get designed on a big screen by someone who isn’t thinking about YouTube, so they miss what really matters:
- Curiosity: creating a curiosity gap that makes someone need to click.
- Emotion: tapping into a feeling, like fear, instead of just stating a topic.
- Readability: a thumbnail is seen tiny. Ten words crammed onto it won't be read.
Repackage videos you've already made
This is the low-hanging fruit most brands miss. If you’ve already made a good, valuable video but its packaging didn’t perform, you’ll see it in your stats: a low click-through rate.
The best candidates are videos with a high average view duration but a low click-through rate. People who click are clearly interested. Not enough people are clicking. Repackage those videos with a new title and thumbnail, and YouTube can still give them fresh impressions.
The Stories of Scale series on HubSpot’s The Science of Scaling YouTube channel is a great example. One episode, “I Spent 24hrs with the Founders of this $250M AI Startup”, went live in November 2025 and had picked up only about 1,500 views after three months.
In February 2026, its title was changed to the “I Spent 24hrs” format, and its “Me / My Clone” thumbnail was swapped for one built around the startup’s $250,000,000 valuation. Views took off almost immediately. The video has now passed 55,000 views, and it’s still climbing.
Other episodes in the series had stalled in the old format too, and they got the same title format and thumbnail style that month. “I Spent 24hrs with the Most Driven Tech Founder I’ve Met” went from about 2,400 views to more than 200,000, and “I Spent 24hrs Working at This $205M Startup” went from about 4,400 to more than 145,000.
That’s a lot of extra viewership without making a single new video.
Where does AI actually help a brand on YouTube?
AI is great for concepting. That includes:
- Topic ideas and research into trending topics and keywords.
- Storyboard assets to plan a video before production.
- Thumbnail and packaging concepts to explore more directions, faster.
AI is also changing editing fast. It’s one of the areas being disrupted most right now, and it helps in a few ways:
- Faster first drafts. AI can get an edit to a rough v1 much faster, so editors spend their time refining instead of starting from scratch.
- Motion graphics and illustrations. Visuals that used to be expensive and take a lot of time to make can now be created far faster.
- Finding and cutting Shorts. AI is great at spotting the moments in a long video that would make good Shorts, and it helps edit them too.
Across concepting and editing, AI saves a lot of time and resources. But you still need the taste of a skilled human to decide what actually makes sense. Use AI to help, just don’t let it become the only brain in the room for your YouTube strategy.
(If you want to try this, see our guide on how to use Claude for YouTube, including how we pair it with vidIQ for research.)
What will happen to brands on YouTube in 2027?
More brands will recognize how important YouTube is, often because their organic traffic is already dropping. They’ll start investing in it seriously, and many will find they should have started a couple of years ago, because it’s hard and it’s competitive.
We expect to see more brands:
- Hiring internal producers and strategists to own YouTube.
- Treating YouTube like a media company, sometimes across multiple channels.
- Making ambitious formats, like docu-series.
- Partnering with creators who already reach successful audiences in their niche.
The brands that thrive will be the ones that take YouTube seriously and lean into what already works on the platform.
The mistake to avoid: going too niche
One mistake we expect a lot of brands to make is creating long-form content for very niche audiences or very niche questions.
If the total addressable audience for a video is tiny, it’s really hard to build a channel. A video that only 700 people would care about probably won’t even reach those 700 people, because it won’t get the impressions.
A better approach is content that reaches your target audience and a wider secondary audience. That broader content is more likely to be surfaced, including to the people you care about most. Balance top-, middle- and bottom-of-funnel content so each video serves a purpose, instead of making everything hyper-specific.
Starting a brand channel? Do this first
If you’re running marketing at a brand and have a mandate to stand up a YouTube channel, the first step is getting buy-in. Convince your managers that YouTube matters (if they aren’t convinced already), then secure a budget to validate and test an initial strategy.
Recap & Next Steps
Here’s the 2027 YouTube playbook for brands:
- Treat YouTube as an owned channel that also feeds AI search.
- Make content that beats the creators on packaging, scripting and value.
- Publish consistently and build a library that snowballs.
- Ignore subscriber count and watch click-through rate and retention.
- Fix your packaging, starting with videos that have high retention but low CTR.
- Use AI for concepting, with a human making the calls.
- Avoid going too niche and balance content across the funnel.
YouTube is getting more competitive every year. The brands that commit now, with a real strategy and specialized team, are the ones that will own their audience’s attention in 2027.
Want help building your brand's YouTube strategy?
Building a YouTube channel that actually grows takes strategy, great packaging, and content made for YouTube first.
Vireo is a YouTube-specialized agency that has helped 300+ leading brands generate billions of organic views through strategy, YouTube video production, and optimization.
If you want our team to look at your channel and map out where to focus first, book a call below.
Frequently Asked Questions
Treat YouTube as an owned, YouTube-first channel. Publish consistently to build a content library, invest in strong titles and thumbnails, script for retention, and balance content across the funnel instead of going too niche. The most successful brands run YouTube like a media company, with specialists in charge.
Yes. YouTube is the number one source mentioned in Google’s AI Overviews, ahead of Reddit and Facebook, according to Ahrefs Brand Radar. AI engines mainly read a video’s transcript and title, and they favor videos that are clearly structured and come from credible sources.
Not much. Subscribers are largely a vanity metric. YouTube decides what to show based on signals like click-through rate and audience retention, and subscribers don’t see every video from channels they follow.
Yes. In many cases YouTube is more valuable than a brand’s website, because people spend more time there and arrive as warmer leads. Even brands with a small audience, like those targeting CTOs, can get real value without millions of views.
Use the advantages creators don’t have: bigger budgets for specialist strategists, in-house subject matter experts, and unique access to locations or data. Then hold your content to the same standard creators do, with less approval friction and a YouTube-first mindset.
Repackage them. Look for videos with high average view duration but low click-through rate, then test new titles and thumbnails. YouTube can give those videos fresh impressions without you making anything new.
