How to read your region restriction result
This YouTube region restriction checker reads the live public status of a video and reports whether it can be watched normally. A Worldwide Availability result means YouTube is serving the video publicly and it is not private, deleted or locked behind a broad block. A Restrictions Found result means the video is unavailable in the standard public context — the most common causes are a manual country restriction, a copyright block, a private/unlisted switch, or a removal.
The important distinction for creators is between a targeted country and a blocked country. Targeting is a promotion choice: you upload globally and simply attract viewers from one market. Blocking is a hard technical wall: viewers in that country see "The uploader has not made this video available in your country" and the view never counts. Targeting costs you nothing; blocking silently deletes a slice of your revenue.
Common reasons a YouTube video gets geo-blocked
- Copyright licensing per territory: a label may own a track in the US but not in Germany, so Content ID blocks only the countries it cannot license.
- Local laws and government requests: some jurisdictions require YouTube to withhold specific content.
- Uploader restrictions: the creator picked a country list in YouTube Studio, often years ago, and forgot about it.
- Age or sign-in gates: restricted content is not technically geo-blocked but behaves like a block for logged-out viewers.
- Private, unlisted or deleted videos: these return the same "unavailable" signal as a region block, which is why the tool reports the reason.
What to do if your video is blocked
Start in YouTube Studio → Content → your video → Details → More options → Restrictions. If a country list exists there, you set the block yourself and can remove it in seconds. If the restriction section is clean, open the Copyright tab: a Content ID claim with the action "Blocked in some countries" is the culprit. Your options are to dispute the claim if your use is licensed or fair use, trim the claimed segment, or replace the audio with a track from the YouTube Audio Library. Re-run the check here after the claim clears to confirm the block is gone.
Why region checks matter for revenue
Ad rates vary enormously by country. Losing the United States, Canada, Australia, the UK or Germany can halve your effective RPM even when your view count looks healthy. Run the numbers with our YouTube Money Calculator, compare markets in the YouTube CPM by country list, and read RPM vs CPM explained to see how a single blocked market changes your payout.
The thumbnail refresh hack for recovered videos
When a block is lifted, YouTube re-enters the video into recommendations with a cold start. The fastest way to capture that second chance is a new thumbnail and title. Test your artwork in the Thumbnail Checker to see exactly how it looks in search results on mobile, pull the current image with the Thumbnail Downloader, and rewrite the packaging with the Title Generator. Creators who refresh packaging after unblocking routinely see a stronger recovery than those who just wait.
Checking other people's videos
The checker also works on any public video, which makes it useful for competitive research: if a competitor's upload is blocked in your main market, that is an open gap you can fill. Grab their metadata with the Tags Extractor and the Video ID Finder before you plan your own version, and follow the YouTube SEO checklist for 2026 when you publish.
Using this page as a geo block checker
A geo block checker answers one question fast: is this video playable in the open, or is a country wall in the way? Paste the link above and the country block check runs instantly against YouTube's live public status — no VPN, no proxy list, no extension. Because the check happens against the public endpoint rather than your own IP address, the result is not distorted by your local network, your ISP or a cached edge server, which is the usual reason a manual VPN test gives you a different answer every time you reload.
Use it in three situations: before you promote a video in a new market, right after a copyright claim appears in YouTube Studio, and whenever a viewer reports "this video is not available in your country". If you need to identify the account behind the upload first — a channel country checker or channel location finder workflow — pull the channel identity with the Channel ID Finder, then run each of that channel's uploads through the checker here. Blocks are set per video, not per channel, so a channel-level lookup alone never tells you which uploads are walled off.
How to check where a video is blocked
To check where a video is blocked, start with the status result above: it tells you instantly whether the upload is publicly playable at all. If the checker reports restrictions and the video is yours, YouTube Studio shows the exact country list under Details → More options → Restrictions. If the video belongs to someone else, compare the public status here against what you see while browsing from another market — a video that returns a restriction signal but plays elsewhere is almost always geo-limited rather than deleted. Keep a note of which markets fail, because the pattern usually reveals the cause: music-heavy uploads tend to lose Germany and Japan, news clips tend to lose specific jurisdictions, and sports content is often licensed region by region.
Region block vs restricted mode: not the same problem
Many creators confuse the two. A region block is set by the uploader or a rights holder and applies to everyone in a country. Restricted mode is a viewer-side filter that a person, a school, a workplace network or a family-link account switches on to hide mature content — it affects only that account or that network, and the viewer can usually turn it off from the YouTube profile menu at the bottom of the page. If your video disappears for one specific person but the checker above reports worldwide availability, restricted mode or an age gate is the likely explanation, not a country block. Age-restricted uploads also vanish for logged-out viewers and inside embeds, which feels identical to a block from the outside but is fixed in a completely different place.