YouTube influencer finder. Brief in. Shortlist out.

A YouTube influencer finder is software that helps brands and agencies discover YouTube creators who match a campaign brief — niche, audience, subscriber band, posting cadence, tone, and budget. Traditional finders are SaaS databases (Modash, HypeAuditor, Heepsy, Upfluence) that license creator metadata and let you filter it through a UI. ZeroTwo replaces the filter UI with a natural-language brief and a web-search-capable LLM, returning a cited shortlist in seconds — no seat license required.

You write a plain-English brief — niche, audience, size, budget, tone, dealbreakers — and ZeroTwo routes it to a web-search-enabled model (Perplexity, Gemini 3 Pro, GPT-5, or Grok). The model queries the live web and YouTube's indexed metadata, evaluates channel authority and topic fit, and returns a shortlist of creators with channel URLs, subscriber counts, niche, audience signals, and a one-line rationale per pick. You can keep iterating in the same chat: 'tighter on the budget', 'only US-based', 'add 3 micro-creators'.

Yes. The free tier of ZeroTwo gives you web-search-enabled models with a daily message allowance — enough to run several creator-discovery briefs and iterate on shortlists. ZeroTwo Pro is $29.99 per month (free tier; cancel anytime) and unlocks unlimited briefs, 60+ models, and deep-research agents for citation-heavy procurement work. No credit card required to start.

Specialist databases like Modash and HypeAuditor license a panel of creator data and charge $99–$1,999 per seat per month for filter access. They are stronger on first-party audience demographics (panel data) and on bulk export. ZeroTwo is stronger on brief-to-shortlist speed, vibe matching, free access, and live web sourcing — and you can hand the AI the same brief, get a shortlist, then take it to a paid DB for deeper audience verification. Most lean teams now use both: AI for discovery, a paid DB for compliance-grade audience checks.

Yes — and this is where AI search out-performs the big databases. SaaS DBs are weighted toward creators above 50K subs because that is who advertisers pay to track. A web-search model is not bound by that bias: ask for 'sub-25K subscriber YouTubers in Korean home-baking who post weekly' and you get real, linkable channels. For long-tail, niche, or non-English creators, ZeroTwo finds matches the legacy databases miss.

As current as the live web. Web-search-enabled models hit search APIs in real time, so newly launched channels and recent subscriber jumps surface within hours. For anything time-sensitive — a creator going viral this week, a controversy you need to screen for — add an explicit recency filter ('last 14 days') to bias the model toward fresh results.

Yes. After it returns the shortlist, ask: 'Draft a first-touch outreach email for creator #3 — warm, no jargon, mention their last upload, propose a $2,000 integrated segment for our X product.' Same chat, same context. Many users finalize the brief, the shortlist, the outreach template, and a follow-up cadence in a single ZeroTwo session.

Use a checklist: engagement rate vs subs (≥3% is healthy mid-tier), comment quality, posting cadence over the last 90 days, audience geography, brand-safety review of the last 20 uploads, and FTC #ad disclosure track record. ZeroTwo can run each step in the same chat — paste a channel URL and ask it to summarize the last 20 videos, flag risk topics, and pull engagement signals from public sources.

It replaces the discovery and shortlisting steps that agencies bill for. Negotiation, contracting, brief management, and post-campaign measurement still benefit from human or specialist tooling — especially at scale. For brands running 1–10 sponsorships per quarter, AI discovery + a freelance manager is now a credible alternative to a full agency retainer.