Wondering why your YouTube view counts jumped even though your leads and sales didn’t move? Want to know which YouTube metrics actually matter now and how to get your videos found in Ask YouTube, ChatGPT, and other AI search tools?

​In this article, you’ll discover how YouTube’s new view count and engaged views work, which YouTube analytics to track instead, and how to optimize your videos, chapters, and Shorts for search and AI discovery.

This article was co-created by Justin Brown with Michael Stelzner and Jerry Potter. For more about Justin, scroll to the end of this article.

#1: How YouTube Now Counts Views vs Engaged Views

YouTube’s view metric is now close to an impression. If someone scrolls past a long-form video and it autoplays for a split second, YouTube counts that as a view.…