AI is affecting absolutely everything on YouTube. You may have recently heard about the Kurzgesagt YouTube Channel Shadowbanning in August 2026. To sum it up, a YouTube Channel with over 25 million subscribers was detected as AI and was shadowbanned by YouTube. You read that correctly.
If a YouTube Channel with 25 million subscribers can be shadowbanned, any channel can be shadowbanned. The sad part about all this AI detection on YouTube is the fact that most YouTube Channels will never know when they have been shadowbanned hence the origination of the internet slang word. It is crazy to Google “shadowbanned definition” and urban dictionary isn’t on the first two pages. What a world. I digress.
If you feel as if your YouTube Channel has been shadowbanned due to a significant drop in views, reach out to us at jesse@wojdylosocialmedia.com. We have worked with a number of YouTube Channels to assist them in better understanding as to why their YouTube views have plummeted in the second half of 2026.
We have seen quite a bit of shake up in the YouTube algorithm over the last few weeks. The initial announcement of the new monetization policies has broken a few other things. We have seen some YouTube Channels immediately double their views on the YouTube Shorts Feed while other channels have seen a steady decline in engagement and overall views.
We know it can be incredibly frustrating to not know what is going on when it comes to the YouTube Algorithm and views disappearing. Please reach out to us at jesse@wojdylosocialmedia.com so we can ease that frustration and come up with a plan to address the loss of views and, more importantly, the loss of income.
Note that most YouTube Channels that are AI shadowbanned find their metrics are even better than they were before the ban, but their overall views are terrible. This is because subscribers are the only people actually seeing the videos and they are likely the loyal fans. Unfortunately, only subscribers do not pay the bills when it comes to YouTube. If new viewers are not finding content, it is nearly impossible to have a financially successful YouTube Channel.
Has AI Made It Harder to Rank in YouTube?
Whether you are a personal injury law firm or a dating influencer, ranking at the top of YouTube search has gotten significantly more difficult since AI/SI has been deployed. It is no longer the case that you can post an amazing video about a topic, properly name it and get thousands of views on YouTube.
There are hundreds of ranking factors and many of these ranking factors have to do with AI. In fact, when publishing a YouTube Short Video, the YouTube app encourages content creators to run it through an AI analysis before publishing the video.
Now that AI has made it significantly harder to rank at the top of YouTube search what can you do to get more views and subscribers? With the new AI/SI algorithms, content creators must consistently publish content. Google announced the Caffeine algorithm update back in 2009 and has never looked back.
This algorithm update basically stated that the more consistent a website or channel publishes content, the more likely the Google spider crawlers will come back to that specific page or channel. When content is not updated, there is no reason for the spiders to recrawl nor reindex the content.
The quickest way to get more internet views or traffic is to publish more high quality content. In the past, we would have warned against publishing too much content, but that is no longer the case with AI algorithms deployed in YouTube and Google.