B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Current
85%
85% -- caption availability rate for YouTube videos (2026-01)
85% of tested public YouTube videos had captions available (auto or manual).
- Sample limited to 500 randomly selected public YouTube videos across 15 languages
Attribution:
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Lighthouse Research Team
Last verified:
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Source verified
Evidence graded
Value
85%
Unit
Percentage
Data Vintage
2026-01
Entity
Sample Size
500
Evidence Quality
B
Strong, reliable evidence
Sourced from a well-regarded research firm or industry leader with transparent methodology and a reasonably large sample.
Single source - not yet corroborated
Score breakdown
Extraction
75
Source Trust
60
Citation Chain
20
Independence
30
Methodology
45
Freshness
95
Source
NoteLM.ai
Primary
Tier B
https://www.notelm.ai/blog/youtube-transcript-api ↗
Source Article
YouTube Transcript API 2026: Free Python Library (No API Key Required) | NoteLM.ai
The easiest way to get YouTube transcripts programmatically is using the youtube-transcript-api
Python library—it's free, requires no API key, and works with any video that has captions. The official YouTube Data API can access captions but requires OAuth authentication and only works for videos you…
Original Research
NoteLM.ai
· Original study ↗
Methodology
Vendor testing of 500 randomly selected public YouTube videos, Jan 5-14, 2026, measuring caption availability across 15 languages
Methodology documented
Segmentation
Industrymarketing
Cite this stat
Plain Text
YouTube videos: 85% caption availability rate. Source: NoteLM.ai (2026-01). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/youtube-videos-captions-availability-2026
HTML Embed
<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/youtube-videos-captions-availability-2026" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>85%</strong> -- caption availability rate for YouTube videos<br><small>Source: NoteLM.ai (2026-01) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/youtube-videos-captions-availability-2026" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
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