Which YouTube creators does your competitor sponsor? Find their repeat channels with your AI agent

Most brands start YouTube sponsorships by searching for channels in their category and guessing. There’s a better starting point: find a brand that has already spent years figuring out YouTube, and look at the channels it keeps coming back to.

Brands don’t renew channels on vibes. When a brand sponsors the same creator again and again, that’s the strongest public evidence that the channel works for them. It’s free to see, if you know where to look. This post shows how to do it with your AI agent, using a real run from October 15, 2026.

Step 1: Pick a guide brand, not just a competitor

Your direct competitors are one option. Often the better choice is what we call a guide brand: a company whose YouTube playbook you want to copy, even if it sells something different. A good guide brand:

• has spent real time and money on YouTube, so its choices carry signal
• sells at a similar price point and business model to yours
• reaches a similar audience in the same countries

For a website builder, a design tool or a productivity app, Squarespace is a natural guide brand. It has sponsored YouTube creators for years across tech, education, commentary and lifestyle. We’ll use it for the example.

Step 2: Ask your agent for the brand’s repeat sponsorships

With the ThoughtLeaders CLI connected, ask in plain words:

Which YouTube channels has Squarespace sponsored the most in the last two years?

Your agent runs:

tl brands winner-channels Squarespace

It returns channels the brand has sponsored at least five times in the window, ranked by how often it came back. Here is the top of the list:

Channel	Subscribers	Videos with a Squarespace sponsorship (2 years)	Sponsorship track record
DeFranco News Clips	1.54M	127	Middle
Tae Kim - Financial Tortoise	346K	113	Strong
Kevin Stratvert	4.46M	109	Strong
Paddy Doyle	341K	106	Strong
Rich Roll	1.6M	68	Strong
Linus Tech Tips	16.9M	64	Strong

The track record column is the channel’s ThoughtLeaders sponsorship score. It rewards two things: how many different brands sponsor the channel, and how many of them come back after a break of at least two months. Bundles booked together don’t count as coming back.

Read this list as repeat-sponsorship candidates, not proof of results. The counts are videos where we detected a Squarespace sponsorship, not individual deals, and we can’t see Squarespace’s own performance numbers. But a brand rarely keeps paying for a channel that doesn’t work, so heavy repetition is a strong public signal.

Notice what the list tells you that a category search never would. A 341K-subscriber fitness channel and a 346K-subscriber finance channel sit next to some of the biggest tech channels on YouTube. Subscriber count clearly isn’t what this brand optimizes for.

Step 3: Expand the winners into look-alikes

A guide brand’s favorite channels are also the obvious ones everyone else will call. The next step is finding additional channels with similar content and audiences. Pick a winner close to your product and ask:

Find channels whose audience looks like Kevin Stratvert’s.

tl channels look-alike "Kevin Stratvert"

Look-alike results need a human eye, and your agent should help with that too. In this run, the closest audience match had 38K subscribers but projected only 34 views per new video. Another projected 65, and a third about 220. A good agent drops those and keeps channels like Teacher’s Tech, with 1.19M subscribers, an established sponsor history and about 10,000 projected views per video. Ask it to filter for you:

Keep only look-alikes with at least 5,000 projected views per video and an active sponsor history.

For a full walkthrough of this step, with a real run and the filters that matter, see Found a YouTube channel that works? Find more channels like it.

Step 4: Vet each channel on YouTube

Before you reach out, open each channel with the ThoughtLeaders Chrome extension. The Top sponsors panel shows which brands the channel has mentioned, whether each mention was sponsored or organic, and the channel’s renewal rate. Detection isn’t exhaustive, so treat a short list as a reason to look closer. The Views performance panel shows whether recent videos are growing or fading, and each video shows the sponsors detected in it.

Then confirm availability and ask for proposals from the ones that pass. This is also where you catch the things a list can’t show: a channel whose sponsors all stopped six months ago, or one whose views depend on a single viral video.

Step 5: Price it before you negotiate

When a creator sends a quote, check it against the channel’s projected views and a fair-value estimate. We wrote a full walkthrough: How to check a YouTube sponsorship quote with your AI assistant.

Why this works

This is the core of how ThoughtLeaders has helped brands buy YouTube sponsorships since 2018. Find brands that have already learned what works. Rank channels by who renews them. Expand to look-alikes. Then decide on value, not price. None of it is new. What’s new is that your AI agent can now run the whole loop in a few minutes, while you stay in charge of the judgment calls.

Try it with your own guide brand

Install the CLI and ask your agent which channels your guide brand keeps sponsoring. Or add the Chrome extension and open any channel’s Top sponsors panel on YouTube.