YouTube Chapters Generator

One of three rules is being broken, and YouTube fails silently on all of them: the first timestamp isn’t exactly 0:00, there are fewer than 3 timestamps, or a chapter is shorter than 10 seconds. This tool checks all three and shows you exactly which one is failing. Also confirm chapters aren’t disabled for the video (in Studio, under Show more) and that the timestamps are in the description itself, not a pinned comment.

Google’s own guidance and creator testing agree they help. Viewers who can jump to what they came for stay instead of leaving; chapters also make your video eligible for Key Moments in Google Search, which is free traffic long-form rarely gets otherwise. The fear that skipping reduces watch time gets the causality backwards — the skip was happening anyway, via the back button.

Short, specific, front-loaded — chapter titles are searchable and appear in Key Moments, so "Fixing muddy audio in one click" beats "Part 3". Keep them under ~40 characters so they don’t truncate on the progress bar, and write them like miniature titles, not filler ("Intro", "Outro" are fine at the edges).

No — chapters are a long-form feature. For Shorts, the equivalent structural work is the hook and pacing inside the clip itself. If you’re cutting Shorts out of chaptered long-form videos, your chapter list is a ready-made map of clip candidates — each well-named chapter is usually a self-contained moment.