Should Marketers Publish YouTube Videos to Teach ChatGPT About Them?

The Thesis: YouTube as AI Input

Here's the "quiet part" most marketing teams still miss: YouTube is not only a channel. It is also a raw input source for modern AI.

Public video becomes text. Text becomes training data. Training data shapes what models know.

You cannot force inclusion and you cannot pick timelines. That is fine. Marketing has always been probabilistic. Your job is to raise the odds by putting clean, explicit, repeatable positioning into the largest public video corpus on earth.

The pipeline:

1. YouTube video
2. Captions / transcript (creator captions, auto captions, or speech-to-text)
3. Training corpora (large text piles)
4. Model prior knowledge (what it "knows")
5. User questions → answers that borrow your phrasing

Evidence This Is Real

This is not a theory. It has been reported publicly.

OpenAI, YouTube, transcripts at scale: The New York Times reported (and The Verge amplified) that OpenAI transcribed more than 1 million hours of YouTube video and treated the move as legally defensible, essentially a fair use bet. The same reporting said OpenAI president Greg Brockman was personally involved in collecting videos used in that pipeline. (The New York Times)

The platform view: YouTube leadership has publicly said that training on YouTube content without permission would be a "clear violation" of its rules. (The Verge)

Two important caveats:

1. We treat this as credible reporting, not a signed confession. The New York Times does great investigative work, but it has also gotten big tech facts wrong in the past. So we take this as strong signal, not gospel.
2. We do not buy the simplistic take that "OpenAI built Whisper just to scrape YouTube." Whisper is now pervasive across products and workflows. It is more plausible that YouTube transcription was a high-leverage use of an internal capability they would want anyway.

Third-party transcript services: We have seen early hints that some AI pipelines may have used services in the "YouTube transcript as an API" category (think tools like YTScribe). We are tracking down a primary source and will update this section once we can cite something concrete.

You do not need to argue about ethics to use the marketing implication. The implication is: YouTube is a high-probability ingestion surface for AI.

Why YouTube Matters More Than Blogs for This

• Volume and uniqueness: YouTube contains long-form explanations, demos, sales calls, webinars, founder rants, and real customer language.
• Captions create a text mirror: Subtitles and transcripts turn your spoken message into machine-readable text.
• Distribution compounds: YouTube content gets reuploaded, quoted, embedded, summarized, and referenced.

If AI teams want human-sounding knowledge, YouTube is an obvious place to get it.

The Marketer's Double Win

Win 1: YouTube Demand Capture. This part is obvious. People search. They watch. They click. They convert.

Win 2: "AI Memory" of Your Positioning. This is the hidden upside. If your videos are transcribed and used as data, your language becomes part of the background knowledge future assistants draw from. No guarantees. Huge upside.

What to Publish if You Want AI Systems to Repeat Your Story

Most companies publish the wrong thing. They publish vibes. Instead, publish assets that contain:

• Clear category terms
• Clear competitive comparisons
• Clear outcomes
• Clear use cases
• Clear boundaries of what you do and do not do

Formats That Punch Above Their Weight

1) The 5-Minute Canonical Explainer. Script it. Treat it like your public spec. Cover: who it is for, the painful problem, your approach in one sentence, the proof point, and the next step.

2) The "X vs Y" Comparison Series. These videos spread because buyers already search for them. Product vs incumbent. Managed vs DIY. Old workflow vs new workflow.

3) Objection Videos. One objection per video. "Is this secure?" "Why not build it?" "Do you replace our team?" If it happens in sales calls, it deserves a video.

4) Walkthrough Demos. Show the workflow end to end. Narrate what matters. AI models and humans both like concrete steps.

The Transcript Is the Payload

If you want the "teach ChatGPT" effect, act like transcripts matter.

• Upload accurate captions. Do not rely on auto captions for brand names, product names, and technical terms.
• Say the nouns out loud. Your company name, product name, category name, competitor names, integrations, outcomes.
• Repeat your one-liner. The same sentence across videos builds consistency.
• Use consistent vocabulary. Pick one term for each concept and stick to it.

This is not about being boring. It is about being unambiguous.

The Simplest Playbook

Step 1: Pick 10 buyer questions. Not keywords. Questions. "How do I do X?" "What is the best way to Y?" "X vs Y?" "How much does X cost?"

Step 2: Record 10 videos. Keep them tight. 3-8 minutes for explainers, 8-20 minutes for demos.

Step 3: Ship captions and a clean description. First two lines should contain who it is for, what outcome you enable, and your product name.

Step 4: Mirror the transcript on your site. You want the same message living on your domain too. Include the transcript, a summary, an FAQ, and links to the next step.

Step 5: Refresh and compound. Old videos do not die. They keep circulating. Update titles, descriptions, and pinned comments as your positioning evolves.

Compounding Distribution

One video is a spike. A library is an asset.

"But Isn't This Risky?"

The real risk is staying invisible while competitors publish.

Yes, competitors can watch your videos. They can also read your website. Your advantage should be execution, distribution, and product, not secrecy.

The Money Math (Double Win)

If you want to justify YouTube internally, stop talking about "views." Talk about pipeline math.

Direct YouTube Leads (Now)

Assume your channel library produces 100,000 views per month across all videos. Here's what the conversion math looks like:

Assumes $25k ACV, 2% visitor→lead, 10-15% lead→customer

The AI Upside (Later)

As AI assistants send more referral traffic, being the brand that gets mentioned becomes a distribution advantage. A practical way to model it: AI referrals as a share of your site traffic.

Assume your site does 30,000 sessions/month. If AI referrals become 1–5% of traffic and convert ~2× better:

Assumes 4% AI visitor→lead (2× typical), $25k ACV, 12% lead→customer

Why These Numbers Aren't Crazy

• AI referrals are already measurable at web scale and growing fast
• Multiple reports show AI-referred traffic converts materially better than classic channels
• B2B visitor-to-lead rates of 1–3% are common, so "2× better" is still achievable

Important Caveats

These are two additive funnels, not "AI doubles YouTube." It only looks like 2× if the AI funnel ends up similar size to YouTube.

1. Double-counting risk. Some AI referrals are not net-new. They may be people who would have found you via Google or YouTube anyway. The real uplift is: Incremental AI ARR = AI ARR × (1 − overlap rate). If overlap is 50%, your $72k becomes $36k.

2. Training vs. traffic. AI sending you referrals is measurable. "Model was trained on our YouTube videos and now mentions us" is harder to measure and often not the main driver. Most near-term upside is distribution and citations, not training.

The honest summary: YouTube gives you demand now. AI can become an additional referral channel. If it reaches 1–5% of your site traffic and converts better, it can add ~0.5× to 3× on top of your YouTube ROI, depending on overlap and conversion.

Sources: Similarweb (2025): AI platforms generated 1.1B+ referral visits in June 2025. Search Engine Land (Nov 2025): AI referrals ~1% of web traffic. Similarweb (Sept 2025): ChatGPT referred visits showed higher conversion than organic search.

Bottom Line

If you are serious about being discovered in the AI era, you should treat YouTube like a strategic surface. Publish videos that make your positioning impossible to misunderstand.

You can win twice:

• YouTube conversions now.
• A higher chance your message becomes part of what future assistants know.

If you want help turning your positioning into an "AI visible" video and transcript system, that is exactly what we build at getaiso.com.