How to find old users with access to your YouTube channel
How to see every person who still has a role on your YouTube channel — including the ones you forgot you ever added.
YouTube keeps no "last active" date next to a permission grant, and it never alerts you when an old collaborator’s access quietly sits unused for months. Finding stale access means checking three separate places: Studio Permissions, Brand Account owners, and connected third-party apps — none of which show the full picture on their own.
If your situation is actually …
- You want the full audit across all three layers, not just Studio → How to audit who has access to your channel →
- You already know someone shouldn't be there and want to remove them → Clean up old channel access →
Where to look for everyone with access
Work through each location in order. Studio Permissions is the most familiar, but it is not the most powerful — Brand Account owners sit above it.
Check Studio Permissions for active and pending grants
Open YouTube Studio and go to Settings → Permissions. You will see a list of every Manager, Editor, Viewer, and Viewer Limited who has been invited. Look for anyone whose name or role you do not immediately recognise, and note anyone still showing a "Pending" badge — pending invites expire after around 30 days but a fresh re-invite can restart the clock silently.
Where: studio.youtube.com → Settings (gear icon) → Permissions
Confirm: The list shows display name, role, and invite status. Screenshot or copy it out — YouTube does not export this.
Check Brand Account owners
If your channel lives on a Brand Account, the owners listed there sit above Studio Permissions. A Brand Account owner can add and remove Studio roles, delete the channel, and initiate an ownership transfer — none of which a Studio Manager can prevent. Go to myaccount.google.com/brandaccounts, select the Brand Account your channel is on, and review the full owner list, including who is marked as primary owner.
Where: myaccount.google.com/brandaccounts
Confirm: You can see every owner and which one is primary. If a former business partner or ex-agency contact is listed here, that is a higher-urgency finding than a Studio role.
Check connected third-party apps
Tools like scheduling apps, analytics dashboards, or old MCN integrations may hold ongoing access to your Google Account. These are separate from Studio Permissions and invisible to your collaborators. Go to myaccount.google.com/permissions and review every app with YouTube-related permissions. Any app you no longer use or recognise should be removed.
Where: myaccount.google.com/permissions
Confirm: Each connected app shows the permissions it was granted. Look for any you did not intentionally install or have not used recently.
Cross-reference against people you actually still work with
Once you have the list from all three places, go through each name and ask: does this person still have a reason to have access? YouTube gives you no "last used" signal, so the question is entirely about whether the relationship is still active — not whether the access looks suspicious. An old editor who delivered work two years ago and still has Editor access is a stale grant even if they have never misused it.
Record what you find before making any changes
Note each person's name, role, which layer they appear on (Studio, Brand Account, or connected app), and your decision — keep, remove, or check. This record becomes the baseline for your next review and makes the removal conversation easier if you need to explain why access was revoked.
Signs a grant should be questioned
- You do not recognise the name or email at all
- The person left your team or agency more than a few months ago
- Someone is listed as a Brand Account owner but should only be a Studio role
- An app is connected that you have not opened in over a year
- There is a pending invite you do not remember sending
- A Manager or Owner role was granted to someone who only needed to upload videos
Common questions
Why this keeps happening
Access grows quietly because there's no record of why it was granted
Finding old users is a manual exercise every time because YouTube gives you no audit log, no expiry dates, and no reminders. The only way to keep the list honest without a quarterly scramble is to capture access decisions at the moment you make them — who, what role, why, and when to review it.