I Tried 365 AI Tools for YouTube, These Are the Best

I tried over 365 AI tools over the last year and at one point I was spending over $10,000 a month just on AI tools alone in order to figure out which ones can actually help you grow on YouTube. And yes, my accountant did hate me. And I tried all kinds of tools to help on things that are YouTube related like scripts, thumbnails, editing, SEO, even analytics. And most of them were trash. Some of them were meh and a few completely changed how I run my channel. So, here are the ones that actually made a difference. And if you appreciate me making this type of content, let me know by gently tapping that like button and let's dive in right now. Because by the end of this video you are going to know the absolute best AI tools to use when it comes to YouTube growth and exactly how I use them. All right, so number one is going to be Google AI Studio. And the reason I put this one first is because it basically watches your screen and it can help you use any of the other tools on this list if you have any trouble using them. Now, they've actually changed the name of this one several times, but basically it's Google AI Studio. Sometimes it's in Gemini API, but whatever it's called, when you Google it, it's the same tool. And the specific feature you want here is the screen sharing feature. So, basically you share your screen with it and it sees everything that you're doing in real time and you ask it questions about whatever's on the screen. Now, this sounds boring until you actually use it because it's really really good. And a while back I was working on something inside of Facebook ads with someone on my team. Now, if you've ever used Facebook ads, it is unbelievably complicated. They're constantly changing the interface and it's exceptionally difficult to find your way around. Now, both of us are pretty competent at this stuff and we were looking for something inside of the Facebook ads interface and we spent over an hour and a half looking for it. And almost as a joke I said, "What if we just try Google AI Studio?" So, we shared the screen, I asked my question and to my surprise, it told us exactly where to click and what to do. And it solved the problem in under a minute. And we just stared at each other in a very dumb way because we were in disbelief. And that is what this tool is. It's like having an IT person for every major platform on the internet, and it can see your whole screen in real time, and it can tell you exactly what to do step-by-step. And the craziest thing is, the last time I checked, this is completely free. So, if you've never tried it, just open it up next time you get stuck on something inside of a tool. Of course, it is going to be better on more well-known tools, but even on lesser-known tools, sometimes it is just, you know, one of those things where it'll kind of tell you where to go, and usually it can help you figure it out. And the first time it works, you're probably going to have the same exact reaction that I did. And like I said, if you're having any trouble with any of these other tools on the list, all you got to do is fire Google AI Studio up, explain what you're trying to find with it, and it'll probably help you solve any issue you have. With that being said, the number two AI tool I'm going to talk about is Descript. And Descript is great for cutting your videos without the choppy AI feel. So, if you ever used an AI video editor to cut down a long video, you've probably noticed something. The cuts are awful. They just don't quite feel right. They might cut you off mid-sentence for no reason. Maybe you take a quick breath, and it decides to make a cut right there. Or maybe there's too much of an awkward pause after you say a sentence. Or maybe after you say the sentence, it cuts it too fast. The whole point is the edit feels really choppy, and of course, because of that, it's awkward for people to watch it, and your YouTube retention is going to tank. Descript figured out how to do this in a way that doesn't sound like a robot edited it. Now, just as a pro tip for Descript, we like to set the auto edit to 0.5 seconds, meaning there can be a 0.5 second pause, and it's not going to edit it automatically. Now, Descript also has a feature where it automatically fixes your audio and it makes sure that your audio sounds really good. It's very similar to what Adobe Podcast does, where it basically just automatically makes your audio sound a heck of a lot better than it was before. Now, another really big thing that Descript does that no other tool does as well is you can actually just edit your videos by editing the transcript. So, if you want to delete the sentence, you can literally just highlight the words and hit delete and it's gone. And the video adjusts automatically and again, it's not super choppy, which is the problem that I've seen with almost every other AI editor. Now, another AI feature it has is the automatic AI contact correction feature. And this is where you can basically be looking over here and you can just have it automatically edit your eye contact to the point where it's just looking at the camera. So, I'll kind of just show you right now. Like I'm looking over here right now, but I can edit it to make it look like it's looking at the camera. Now, fair warning about this one, use it with a little bit of discretion. Don't apply it to your entire video or else it will look a little bit creepy. Cuz if you do apply it to your entire video, your eyes get this weird glassy dead doll look. But if you need to just fix, you know, let's just say 5 seconds of your video where you kind of were looking over at your script too much or something like that, maybe you were glancing down at something and it just doesn't quite look right, you can use this feature and just edit that part of your video. And that's what it's really perfect for. And in my opinion, Descript's editor in general is up there with CapCut when it comes to a very simple and easy-to-use editor, but it has these AI features that really make it the number one choice, especially if you're just trying to do basic edits. And the coolest thing is Descript just released an API. And so, there's probably going to be ways to literally just edit with AI. You can just send the video to Descript and have it do automatic edits and then maybe send it to a more advanced editor later on down the line. All right, quick break. This week I'm doing a one-time-only workshop where I talk about how to finally make money from youtube.com in 2026. And you can check it out down the description and the pin comment below. At this workshop, I'm going to be giving away the niche validator Pro completely free. This is a GPT powered by a piece of software that I've been working on for a long time now and it's been trained on thousands of hours of my teaching coaching sessions and more. So you don't have to spend years to pick a profitable niche. You can do it in a matter of minutes. Heck, it's even possible to do it in seconds sometimes. And I'm going to be giving this away at the workshop. So make sure you click the link in the description and then show up to the workshop. And the best way to do that is to make sure you add it to your calendar once you've signed up for it. So you basically just click add this to your calendar once you're on the Thinkific page after you've registered. And it'll show up as either Google, Apple, or Outlook calendar, whatever calendar you have. So you can make sure you won't miss the chance to grab the niche validator Pro completely free. And you'll also be able to ask me questions live. So I look forward to meeting you. Can't wait to see you there. I'm going to be showing you this new opportunity. It's completely free and it's amazing whether you basically want to use it to get a better job, use it to network, use it to make some passive income, start a side hustle, make a full-time income, or even start a full-on business. It works incredibly well with all of those and it's completely free. So make sure you click the link in the description and then show up to the workshop. And now back to your regularly scheduled content. All right, next is going to be one of 10.com and this tool is really good for outlier video research as well as bulk thumbnail generation. So first, let's talk about finding outlier video ideas. Now, we all know if you've watched my channel at all, video ideas are the most important thing when it comes to a YouTube channel success, right? Finding the right ideas is going to make everything else so much easier, okay? So this tool is great for finding videos that drastically over-perform their channel's average. And if you followed any of my content, you know that I built the ICON method. And one of 10.com can be used in conjunction with the icon method to find winning video ideas. And basically, all you got to do is find keywords that are related to your niche, type them into the oneof10.com search, and then start looking for videos that are outliers. Now, my favorite way of doing this is finding videos that got at least 100,000 views. They're from smaller channels, so less than 100,000 subscribers. There's at least a five to one view to subscriber ratio, meaning if the channel has 50,000 subscribers, then the views are at least 250,000. And you want to check the actual video itself as well as the thumbnail to make sure that the video itself is either mediocre or bad. If the video is really good, then I typically don't do it. And the reason for that is because you want to make sure that it's the idea that's doing the heavy lifting, not the person making a, you know, wonderful piece of content that's just like masterfully crafted. And oneof10.com makes this significantly easier to do. You can actually just toggle the search by all of those criteria as well. And you can even ask oneof10.com for video ideas for you, and the AI will just kind of go and find them as well. Now, the second thing is thumbnail, and here's the part that most people miss. When you ask any normal AI tool to make eight thumbnails, it tries to make all eight in one shot. Now, that sounds fine until you understand how these tools work. See, there's a fixed token budget per query, and that means that if you ask for eight thumbnails with ChatGPT or NanoBanana with Google Gemini, each thumbnail is going to get 1/8 of the token budget. So, you're going to end up with eight super mediocre or probably even bad thumbnails. Oneof10.com does a great job making the thumbnails. It has great prompts, and it does a better job than just the normal base models, and it does eight separate queries as well. So, each thumbnail gets the full budget, and you get eight different high-effort options to pick from. And if you have a good eye for thumbnails, this is a massive time-saver. Now, another tool that's pretty good when it comes to making thumbnails is pixels. And it's really going to depend what types of thumbnails you're making when it comes to making a better thumbnail with oneof10.com versus pixels. And one thing I will say is if you don't get the prompt right on the first try, unfortunately, a lot of these thumbnail tools really have a hard time understanding English. And so I've had it where the thumbnail is almost right, and then you talk to the thumbnail tool and it just completely messes it up. It just makes it actually like 10 times worse. So a pro tip here is if you don't get it right on the first try, just start over and then just change your prompt a little bit. All right, number five is ViddIQ. And this one is really good, especially for keyword research, right? And most people are doing this wrong. Now, ViddIQ has been around forever, but they've leaned really hard into AI lately, and a few of the newer features are genuinely useful. And the one I use the most is called related keywords. So it basically uses AI to map out which keywords are semantically connected across YouTube. And basically, ViddIQ has processed billions of YouTube search queries and learned which terms the algorithm treats as linked together. Another way of saying this is which terms are semantically related to each other. And that's a fancy way of saying if a person is interested in this keyword, they're also very likely going to be interested in this other keyword. So, just as an example, if you look up remote jobs, Shane Hummus is going to show up near the top. If you look up Shane Hummus, remote jobs is going to show up near the top. But you might also notice that side hustles is semantically related to remote jobs. So this is actually incredibly useful to know that if somebody's interested in remote jobs, there's a very good chance they're also interested in side hustles as well. And when you look up one keyword, it surfaces the cluster of related ones that the algorithm already groups it with. And that sounds boring until you actually see what it does. So, why does this matter? Well, if I want to target someone that's interested in remote jobs, ViddIQ tells me that they're probably also interested in side hustles, freelancing, financial freedom, passive income, etc., etc. And that tells me what videos I should make next. And it also tells me what not to make, which is honestly just as valuable. And VidIQ also has a separate AI keyword generator. And this is where you give it a niche, and it spits out keywords with search volume and competition scores attached. And it's one of the best uses I found to generate keyword research with VidIQ. Then you just plug the keywords into one of 10 to find the actual videos, and these would be the videos that are getting clicks on those terms. And if you stack these two, you've got an AI doing your topic research and a real data tool validating it. So, I found VidIQ suggestions to actually be pretty accurate, which I do not say about most AI tools. All right, so number six is going to be FireCut. And this is for the Adobe Premiere people out there. So, if you're using Adobe Premiere Pro to basically do your editing, FireCut is a plugin that auto cuts your raw footage. Now, it's not quite as smooth as Descript, but if you're already living in Premiere Pro, it can auto cut your footage and probably save you about 30 minutes to an hour each time. And it's going to ensure that you don't have to switch workflows. So, FireCut saves you the hour that you'd otherwise spend trimming filler manually. So, you push a button and it's done. And then you get to move on. Pretty cool. And again, there's a lot of tools out there that claim to do this, but almost all of them make the editing super choppy. FireCut was one of the only ones we tested out of probably about a dozen of them that actually had pretty good editing. All right, now the last section is the one that I think most of you have been waiting for, and this is the chatbots, right? So, we're going to talk about all the different chatbots and which ones are good and which ones are useful for different tasks. So, these are the ones that almost everybody knows. We're talking the ChatGPTs, the Clauds, the Groks, the Geminis, the Perplexities of the world, and my honest take on each one. All right, so let's talk about how I use these different LLMs. And first we're going to talk about the chatbot feature, which is what most people use. And then I'll briefly touch on other features where they're deeper, such as using Claude code. So, each one of these does a specific job in my stack. And the trick is knowing which tool to open for which problem. So, here's what each one is actually good for. Claude is the default. Claude is what I open first for pretty much everything. For content creation, writing scripts, brainstorming, structuring videos, Claude is just better than the alternatives for most stuff. And if I could only have one tool when it comes to content creation, I would use Claude. Now, a lot of these different LLMs kind of go up and down in how good they are. I think that sometimes they throttle the token usage because maybe they're having cash flow issues on the back end or something. I don't know what's going on, but sometimes the LLM is really good and then a month later it'll kind of dip in performance and then a new update will come out and it'll be really good again. But over the last year or so, Claude has basically been equal to ChatGPT when it comes to strategic thinking and maybe even a little bit smarter. Then Claude has Claude Code, which is a whole separate level for anyone building with AI. We built some amazing stuff with Claude Code, but with that being said, Claude Code is pretty complicated and it's not necessary for YouTube. Claude Projects on the other hand lets you stack context the way no other tool does cleanly. And if I could only have one AI tool, this would be it. I would be using Claude Projects. So, if you're starting from scratch, start here. Whatever you're doing, this is your default. And when it comes to Claude Projects, one pro tip is you can actually get a bunch of great context such as your life story, testimonials, your general philosophies, and you can just upload all of those things into Claude Projects and that way it always has a reference for what you believe to be true when it comes to whatever the subject is that you're talking about. And if you don't have those built out yourself, you can always find somebody else whose philosophies you agree with and put those in your project as well. Okay, so ChatGPT is the second opinion. So, ChatGPT of course used to be king. Now I treat it as my second opinion. So, I'll ask both Claude and ChatGPT the same question, especially if it's a more difficult question, and if they agree, I move on. If they disagree, I copy and paste each other's response and I make them argue with each other until one of them wins and they both come to a consensus. So, it's still excellent at strategic thinking, data analysis, and the thumbnail vision has gotten really strong lately. But Claude definitely wins when it comes to writing and most creative tasks. However, chat GPT earns its spot in the stack as a sanity check. And next is Gemini. Gemini is kind of like the visuals guy, okay? Gemini is the most affordable of the big named AI tools and it's the strongest at visuals. Thumbnails specifically, however, chat GPT has gotten really strong at thumbnails lately. But Google has been pouring resources into the visual side and it shows. I was messing around with thumbnail generation of Gemini earlier this week and the results were genuinely impressive. And it's also climbing in raw intelligence fast. And if Google plays their cards right, I could see Gemini honestly win the whole AI race down the line. But right now in my stack, it's the thumbnail tool. And it can be pretty good at coming up with video ideas just because Google owns YouTube and they have access to all of YouTube's data. Next, let's talk about Perplexity. And Perplexity is really good at research and specifically finding anecdotes and examples from the real world. So, let's just say I am writing a piece of content and I need a real world example. Like, find me someone who posted 300 videos on YouTube and didn't have a single video blow up. Perplexity searches Reddit, blogs, articles, everywhere and pulls actual sources. And then I can include a real example instead of a hypothetical. That's the job. Nothing else does it as cleanly. All right, next is Grok and Grok is the news feed. And so basically Grok is really good at one thing and that is the news. Because Grok is wired directly into X/Twitter and when something happens in the world, Grok knows about it before any other AI does. So, if something just happened 20 minutes ago, chances are if you ask Grok, you're going to get a reasonable answer. With other AI tools, it might take an entire day or even several days to update. Additionally, Grok can be really good for finding anecdotes, but only anecdotes that come from X/Twitter. So, examples and anecdotes it can be good for finding, but again, only ones that come from X/Twitter. And for anything else, I'm not going to lie, Grok is pretty rough. Sometimes it is hilariously bad. So, I use it for breaking news and occasionally for finding viral tweets that match a point that I'm trying to make. Now, I know that every freaking YouTuber on the internet is going to be telling you that you should be using Claude code or whatever when it comes to YouTube stuff. Don't get me wrong, it can be very useful here and there. But, most of these features are actually not that useful. And they're really not any more useful than just the normal Claude interface. And by the time that you spent the time to actually figure out the feature, there's some other feature that came out that's even better. And that is just the simple truth about AI tools. They are incredibly useful, but it's also incredibly easy for you to simply just waste your time chasing rabbits. A perfect example is all the videos that say that you can edit your entire video with something like Claude code attached to Remotion. All of the animations that are created in those videos end up looking like absolute AI slop. And if you look at all of those different AI expert YouTubers, they don't edit their videos with Remotion and Claude code. They either edit their videos themselves or they have an actual professional editor editing the video. So, I'm not going to sit here and lie to you and say that, you know, these tools can edit your video when in reality they can't. The only one that's close to it is Descript. But, when that changes, I will let you know. And the truth is it's not really as much about what tool you're using as the way you're using it. For instance, we have master prompts within our program. Some of these prompts and some of these tools we actually give away in the live training. So, definitely click the link in the description and pin comment below to attend that live training. And so, for instance, we've of course have really good prompts for Claude code and Claude skills. And we also have ChatGPT prompts. And we make custom GPTs. But, guess what? It takes us a long time to train those GPTs to get things right. We have to give them examples of answers that are wrong, as well as examples of answers that are right, and then a bunch of tweaking and fine-tuning, and then eventually they get really, really good. But, that might be after I've personally put 20 hours into the GPT. And so, these custom tools where an actual expert has been working on them and putting a lot of time into them are going to be your best bet. And these custom tools can either be a Claude skills tool or a custom GPT. But yeah, that is just the truth of the matter. And for almost all these tools, I highly recommend that you actually just talk to the tool. Now, for most of them, there is a built-in tool. For instance, on ChatGPT, you can just talk to it. It's really good. But for any tool that doesn't have a built-in tool where you can just talk to it, you can use something like WhisperFlow. WhisperFlow is exceptionally good for just literally talking to whatever tool that you're using, and it makes it way easier to just make content. Because when you start typing stuff, I don't know, it just puts you in the wrong state of mind, and it's just not a creative way of being, right? It just For for me, it just takes me out of my creativity, whereas if I just talk, it's very easy for me to stay in that creative flow, and I'm able to make really good content. So, most of the time when I'm making content, for instance, if I'm writing a script, I'm going to spend probably 80 to 90% of the time literally just talking to it. And like I said before, your workflow, the entire system that you use, the prompts you use, that is going to make a way bigger difference than using some fancy Claude code tool, at least at this point in time. And your overall strategy for how you post on YouTube and how much you help other people is going to make a huge difference as well. And that is why you should definitely attend our live training that we're doing this week. Click that link in the description and the pin comment below. And also, if you're a business owner, if you're a YouTuber who's crushing it and you want to crush it even harder, if you're a YouTuber who's getting a lot of views, but you want to get a lot better at monetization, or if you're a professional that wants to treat YouTube like a business, then go ahead and book a call with us. Those are the exact types of people that we help, and we can help you with your entire custom AI setup. Click that link in the description and the pin comment below for that. And if you want to see an example of someone that we worked with, you can check out this video right here.