Is Growati Against YouTube's Terms of Service?

The short version: connecting a tool to your channel through Google's official OAuth and the YouTube Data API is the sanctioned way to do it, and that is what we do. What would put a channel at risk is not the API. It is what you upload.

This is the most common question we get before anyone signs up, so here is the specific version rather than a reassuring paragraph.

What we actually request

We authenticate through Google OAuth, the same consent screen you have used to grant any third-party app access to a Google account. You see the scopes before you approve them, and you can revoke us at any time from your Google account's connections page without contacting us.

What we need is the ability to read your channel and its videos, and to update video metadata and thumbnails on videos you own. That is it. We do not request permission to delete videos, manage your account, read your email, or touch anything outside YouTube.

Full detail is on our permissions page, which lists each scope and the specific feature that requires it.

What we do not do

We do not scrape. There is no headless browser signing into your account, no session cookie stored on our side, no automation of the YouTube Studio interface. Those approaches do violate YouTube's terms, and they are also how accounts get flagged, which is why the distinction matters more than it sounds.

We do not buy, generate, or simulate engagement. No views, no subscribers, no comments.

We do not publish without you. By default, generated metadata sits in a review step and nothing reaches your channel until you accept it. That is a deliberate product decision rather than a compliance one, and I have written separately about why we do not auto-publish.

The part that is actually about you

Here is where I would push back on the framing of the question.

The terms most likely to matter to an automation channel are not the API terms. They are YouTube's monetisation policies on repetitious and mass-produced content — the ones that decide whether a channel is eligible for the Partner Programme, and that have been enforced more visibly since 2025.

Those policies are about the videos. A channel publishing near-identical text-to-speech content over stock footage is exposed regardless of what wrote the descriptions. A channel making genuinely distinct videos is not exposed just because a pipeline generated its chapters.

No tool can make you compliant there, ours included. Anyone selling you compliance as a feature is selling you something they do not have.

Disclosure, and what it does not require

Google's own guidance asks creators to disclose meaningfully altered or synthetic content in the upload flow, and that disclosure is about the video itself — a synthetic voice, a generated face, a fabricated event.

Generated metadata is not covered by that. A title, a description, or chapter timestamps written by software is not synthetic media in the sense the disclosure asks about. If your video uses an AI voice or generated footage, that is a disclosure; the description is not.

I am telling you where the line is rather than where I would like it to be, because getting this wrong in either direction is expensive.

The honest caveats

I am a co-founder of the product this post is about, so weigh it accordingly. Read our permissions page and the security page rather than taking a blog post's word for what we access.

More importantly: policies change, and this post is a snapshot. YouTube has revised its monetisation guidance on mass-produced content within the last two years, and it may again. If your channel's eligibility depends on a specific reading, the current YouTube Help documentation is the authority and we are not.

And the risk that never appears in a terms-of-service question is the boring one — you are granting a third party the ability to change what your audience sees. That is real whoever you grant it to. We wrote about that too, including the parts that do not flatter us.

Before you connect anything

Open your Google account's third-party access list and read what is already in there.

Most people find something they granted years ago and have not thought about since. That is the standard the question should be applied to, not just to the next tool you are considering.