YouTube Shopping Is Headed to 35 Countries, and Ask YouTube Wants to Answer Your Shopping Questions

If you've ever bought a pair of headphones because someone held them up to a camera and talked about the bass for eleven minutes, you already use YouTube as a shopping search engine. At Made on YouTube today, the company leaned into that from both ends: more ways for creators to get paid when you buy something, and an AI that will answer the shopping question for you.

The creator half is the more concrete one. The YouTube Shopping affiliate program, which lets creators tag products in their videos and earn a commission on sales, is expanding to 35 countries by the end of the year. YouTube says more than 1.3 million creators are already in the program, and that gross merchandise volume through it has grown 13x over the last two years.

Amazon tags go international

YouTube recently let U.S. creators tag Amazon products, and it's bringing that to India and Brazil in the coming weeks, with more countries promised before the end of the year. Tags work on regular videos, livestreams, and Shorts. YouTube's own study says tags get more than twice as many clicks as links in the description, which is YouTube grading its own homework, but anyone who has watched their description links go untouched will believe it.

The more useful change is for channels with a global audience. A product link that only works in the U.S. is dead weight for a viewer in Germany or India. Tags will now show a link localized to wherever the viewer is watching, and the creator still earns the commission on that sale. YouTube is also adding affiliate campaigns, where retailers and brands can offer exclusive commission rates or bonuses for content that features specific products.

Ask Studio wants to help write your brand pitch

On the sponsorship side, YouTube Creator Partnerships, the tool that puts channels in front of brands, is now available in 20 countries. Once a sponsored video is up, a creator can hand the brand a one-click access code so it can see how the video is performing and put paid media behind it with creator partnerships boost. Ask Studio, the AI assistant in YouTube Studio, will "soon" draft responses to brand briefs, build pitches, and suggest how to tailor your Media Kit to a specific brand.

Dynamic brand segments are still in testing. They let a creator insert one sponsor segment into up to 20 long-form videos at once, target it by region, and attach a shelf with a call-to-action button. YouTube also says it's spending hundreds of millions of dollars on incentives for agency partners. If you were hoping for a better Premium revenue share or a new Shorts split, this batch of business announcements doesn't touch them. Every change here is about commerce and brand deals.

Ask YouTube starts answering the shopping question

Ask YouTube is picking up shopping features. You can ask questions and follow-ups on your phone or by voice while watching on a TV. Search for reviews of a specific product and you may get organized video recommendations, like a comparison table of product attributes and categories built around your preferences. Tap a video and you can keep asking questions about the product right on its watch page. YouTube didn't attach a date or a list of regions to any of this.

If that table sends you to the review that answers your question, the creator whose tag you tap gets paid. If the table itself is the answer, assembled from several creators' reviews, you can buy without watching any of them. YouTube hasn't said how affiliate credit works when a purchase starts inside Ask YouTube. Meta spent the same day pitching its Muse agent as something that can shop for you, so YouTube isn't the only platform that wants to own the moment right before checkout.

For affiliate creators, 35 countries and international Amazon tags are money you can start planning around. What YouTube still has to answer is which creator gets the commission when a sale starts in an Ask YouTube comparison table.