YouTube Chapters Not Showing? Here's Why

This is the most common support question we get that has nothing to do with our product: "Why aren't my chapters showing up?"

The answer is almost always that one of three rules got broken, and the person breaking them had no idea the rules existed. If you asked ChatGPT for chapters, it wrote you a perfectly reasonable list of timestamps and topics. It didn't check them against YouTube's requirements, because you didn't ask it to and it has no particular reason to know them.

Here's the set of constraints that decides whether metadata renders, ranked roughly by how often we see each one broken.

Chapters have three hard requirements, and missing any one kills all of them

This is the cruellest rule on the platform, because the failure mode is silent and total. Get one thing wrong and you don't get partial chapters — you get none, with no error message.

1. The first chapter must start at 0:00. Not 0:01, not 0:05. If your first timestamp is anything other than zero, no chapters render.
2. You need at least three. Two well-chosen chapters render as nothing.
3. Each chapter must be at least 10 seconds long. One tight 6-second segment in an otherwise valid list takes the whole list down with it.

They also need to be in ascending order, one per line, in the description. Our free timestamp link generator will format a list correctly if you would rather not count seconds by hand.

An AI drafting from a transcript will happily give you a first chapter at 0:34 because that's where the intro actually ends, and a 7-second chapter because that's genuinely how long that section is. Both are correct summaries of the video. Both produce zero chapters on YouTube.

Title length has two limits, and the one that matters isn't the one that's documented

The documented cap is 100 characters. YouTube rejects anything longer.

The practical limit is much shorter, because titles truncate in browse and search — and where they truncate depends on the surface and the device. A title that reads well at 95 characters on desktop can lose its last four words in a mobile feed, and the last four words are usually where you put the payoff.

Front-load accordingly. Our brand profiles default the maximum title length to 70 characters rather than 100 for exactly this reason, and channels that go shorter than that generally do better.

Descriptions are 5,000 characters, but only about the first 150 exist

The cap is 5,000. What a viewer sees before tapping "Show more" is roughly the first hundred-odd characters, and the exact cut varies by device and surface.

So the ordering matters more than the content. Whatever you need read — the hook, the sponsor mention, the one link that matters — goes in the first two lines. A description that opens with "In this video, we'll be taking a look at..." has spent its entire visible allocation on nothing.

Thumbnail specs are where uploads actually fail

• 1280×720 is the recommended size, with 640 pixels as the minimum width.
• 16:9 aspect ratio.
• Under 2 MB.
• JPG, PNG, or GIF.
• Your account needs to be verified before you can upload a custom thumbnail at all.

The file size is the one that catches people. An AI image generator will hand you a beautiful PNG well over 2 MB, and you find out at upload. Our free thumbnail previewer shows you what the image looks like at feed size before you get that far, and the thumbnail downloader pulls existing ones if you want something to compare against. This is also why a generated thumbnail isn't finished when the image is finished — it still has to be resized and compressed to spec, which is a step no chat window performs.

Hashtags have a cliff

You can put up to 15 hashtags in a description. Go over, and YouTube ignores all of them rather than the excess ones. The first three appear above your video title.

Same shape of failure as chapters: exceeding the limit doesn't cost you the extra ones, it costs you the lot.

How to spot AI metadata nobody checked

Chapters starting at 0:01 or later. A title that's exactly 100 characters, which means it was written to a cap rather than to a length. Descriptions that open with a summary of what the video is about instead of a reason to keep reading. Nineteen hashtags.

None of this means the writing was bad. It means it was never checked against the platform it was written for, which is a different failure and an easier one to fix.

One caveat on everything above

YouTube changes these. The thumbnail size cap has moved before, and the chapter requirements have been clarified more than once since they launched.

If a number here matters to a decision you're making, check it against YouTube's own Help documentation rather than against this post: video chapters and custom thumbnails cover most of what is above. Any article listing platform limits is a snapshot of the day it was written, including this one.