How it works
YouTube pulled public dislike counts in November 2021. The button still exists, creators still see their own numbers in Studio, but viewers lost the signal. This checker brings it back. Paste a video link and you get the estimated dislike count, the exact like count, a green-red ratio bar, and an overall rating out of 5.
The data comes from Return YouTube Dislike, an open-source project that archived real dislike counts before YouTube hid them and has kept estimates alive ever since through votes submitted by millions of browser extension users. Your browser queries their public API directly. Nothing routes through our servers, and nothing about you gets logged along the way.
Where the numbers come from
Three sources feed each estimate. Archived counts captured before the 2021 removal anchor older videos. Live votes from extension users cover everything since. And extrapolation fills the gaps between those samples.
The practical upshot: popular videos get estimates that track reality closely, usually within a few percent. Tiny videos with a handful of extension viewers get rougher numbers. Likes and view counts are always exact, they come straight from YouTube.
Reading the ratio
Raw dislike counts mislead. 5,000 dislikes on 10 million views is a great result; 5,000 on 50,000 views is a disaster. That’s why the ratio bar matters more than either number alone. Healthy videos usually sit above 90 percent liked.
Context matters too. Political commentary and drama content naturally run lower ratios than cooking tutorials, so compare within a niche rather than across the whole platform. And when a video shows a poor ratio plus a top comment section full of corrections, that’s usually a sign of factual problems, not just an unpopular opinion.
Ten seconds here saves real time. Before you follow a two-hour tutorial, buy something off a review, or cite a video in your own work, the ratio tells you how the audience that already watched it felt. Financial and health videos sitting under 80 percent liked deserve extra skepticism.
Questions people ask
How accurate are the dislike estimates? For videos with meaningful traffic, typically within a few percent, since estimates anchor on archived real counts plus a large live voting sample. Very new or very small videos have wider error margins.
Why did YouTube hide dislikes in the first place? The official reason was protecting small creators from targeted dislike attacks. The button still works and creators see their own counts in YouTube Studio, only the public display went away.
Do I need the browser extension? Nope. The extension is how the project collects votes, but the lookup works from any browser with nothing installed.
Can creators see exact dislikes on their own videos? Yes, in YouTube Studio under Analytics. This checker exists for videos you don’t own.
What does the rating out of 5 mean? It’s derived from the like-to-dislike split, roughly what the old star system would have shown. A video at 4.8 or above is very well received; under 4.0 means a notable share of viewers disliked it.
Which link formats can I paste? Watch URLs, youtu.be links, Shorts, embeds, live links, or the bare 11-character video ID. The tool pulls the ID out automatically.