You pasted your link, published, and now it just sits there as grey text nobody can tap. Before you start deleting and re-uploading: on YouTube, whether a link is clickable depends almost entirely on where you put it. Some spots are blocked for everyone on purpose. Others only work once your channel has a certain feature unlocked. A couple work fine but get hidden by your own comment filters.
This guide goes surface by surface, so you can find your exact situation in about thirty seconds, apply the fix, and move on. Everything here is checked against YouTube’s own Help Center pages, not guesswork from other blogs.
Quick diagnosis: where is your link?
Shorts description or Shorts comment: not clickable for anyone, by design. No setting fixes this. Skip to the Shorts section for the workarounds.
Long-form video description or long-form comment: should be clickable, but only if your channel has advanced features enabled. This is the most common fixable cause.
Channel profile links (the link next to the Subscribe button): clickable for everyone. If it’s missing, it probably wasn’t published or was removed under the External links policy.
Channel description (the About text) or live chat: YouTube says URLs there are clickable, except when viewed in the mobile app. So it may work on desktop and look dead on your phone.
Posts (the community-style posts on your channel): YouTube’s link guide lists URLs in posts as not clickable, so don’t rely on them.
Why Shorts links stopped working (it’s not a bug)
In August 2023 YouTube announced that, starting August 31, 2023, links in Shorts comments, Shorts descriptions and the vertical live feed would no longer be clickable, rolling out gradually. The reason it gave: the speed and engagement of Shorts made it easy for spammers and scammers to drop links leading to malware, phishing and scams. Around the same time, YouTube removed the clickable social media icons from desktop channel banners for the same reason.
So if you remember tapping links in Shorts before, you’re not imagining it. It was a deliberate platform-wide change, and YouTube’s current Help page still says plainly that URLs in Shorts comments and Shorts descriptions are non-clickable to reduce spam and scam attempts. Hashtags and @mentions in Shorts are still tappable, which is why those look “live” while your URL doesn’t.
What this means in practice: stop rewriting the URL, adding https://, or shortening it with a different service. None of that changes anything in a Short. Put your energy into the routes below instead.
Fix for Shorts: use the Related video link
The one official clickable link inside the Shorts player is the Related video. It shows up as a tappable link just below your channel handle and can point to one of your own videos, Shorts or live streams, as long as it’s public or unlisted.
To add it on desktop: open YouTube Studio, click Content in the left menu, click the Short you want to edit, pick a Related video from your channel, and click Save.
If you don’t see the option, check your feature access. YouTube’s feature list places “Add a Related Video to your YouTube Short” under intermediate features, which you unlock by verifying your phone number. Go to Settings > Channel > Feature eligibility in YouTube Studio to see what’s enabled.
The smart play: make that related video a long-form video whose description holds your real external link. A Shorts viewer taps through, lands on a long video, and the link in that description is clickable (if you have advanced features). It’s one extra tap, but it actually works.
Fix for long-form descriptions and comments: turn on advanced features
On regular videos, links in the description and comments are clickable, but YouTube says that to add clickable external links you must enable your channel’s access to advanced features. Advanced features also include pinning comments, which matters if your plan is a pinned comment with a link.
Check it: YouTube Studio > Settings > Channel > Feature eligibility. If advanced features show as Enabled, you’re fine. If not, YouTube offers three paths: channel history (many channels qualify automatically once they have enough positive history), verifying your identity with a valid ID, or verifying with a short video selfie. ID and video verification aren’t available to every creator in every region, and YouTube notes you have to keep following the Community Guidelines to keep access.
Once enabled, also sanity-check the link itself: no spaces, no line break in the middle, and a full address like https://yoursite.com. And remember that viewers on some devices see only the first lines of a description, so put your most important link near the top.
Your comment with a link disappeared or never showed
If the problem is that comments with links vanish rather than show as plain text, look at your own moderation settings first. In YouTube Studio, Settings > Community > Content controls has a toggle to hold comments and viewer posts that contain hashtags and URLs for review. When it’s on, those comments wait in your held queue instead of appearing publicly.
Go to the Comments section in YouTube Studio, open the Held tab, and approve the ones you want. If you’re the one posting links (say, a resource list in a pinned comment), approve it there and then pin it.
If the comment was on someone else’s channel, their filters apply, not yours. There’s nothing you can change on your side.
The link that always works: channel profile links
After the 2023 change, YouTube added prominent clickable links on channel profiles, near the Subscribe button, on both mobile and desktop. This is your most reliable link on the whole platform, and it’s where Shorts viewers end up when they tap your name.
To set it up: YouTube Studio > Customization > Profile. Under Links, click Add link, enter a title and the URL, then click Publish. You can add up to 14 links. Only the first one is shown prominently next to Subscribe; the rest appear when someone taps to see more links. So put your single most important destination first.
In every Short, say it out loud or on screen: “Link is on my channel, tap my name.” That one sentence does more than any URL typed into a Shorts description ever will now.
End screens and cards: useful, with conditions
End screens can point to videos, playlists, your channel and, for creators in the YouTube Partner Program, approved external websites. The video has to be at least 25 seconds long, and end screens don’t show on videos set as made for kids. Cards work similarly: the Link card that goes to an outside website is only available to YouTube Partner Program members.
YouTube’s help pages describe end screens and cards for regular videos; they aren’t part of the Shorts experience. If you’re not in the Partner Program yet, use end screens to point to a video whose description carries your link.
When YouTube removes or blocks the link itself
Sometimes the link isn’t just unclickable; it gets removed, or your video gets flagged. YouTube’s External links policy applies to video, audio, channel, comments, pinned comments and live streams, and covers clickable URLs, URLs shown on screen, obfuscated links and even telling people out loud where to go. Links to malware, phishing pages, pornography, pirated paid content, and other content that breaks the Community Guidelines are not allowed.
That includes the page you link to and, in practice, where that page sends people. A first violation usually means a warning, with the option of policy training; repeat violations within 90 days bring strikes, and three strikes in 90 days can end the channel. If a link of yours keeps getting removed, check what’s on the destination page before trying again, and avoid stacking redirects or shorteners that hide the final address.
If nothing works: a simple setup that survives YouTube’s rules
Here’s the setup that works no matter what format you post: one link in your channel profile links (first position), a Related video on every Short that points to a long-form video, and that long-form video’s description carrying your clickable link once advanced features are enabled. Shorts viewers tap your name or the related video; long-form viewers tap the description. Everyone has a path.
Because the channel profile link is the one spot every viewer can reach, it helps to make that link a single page that holds everything you want people to find: your shop, booking form, latest offer, other socials. A link-in-bio page like onesol.io/yourname works well here, and you can update what’s on it without touching YouTube at all.
Still stuck? Open YouTube Studio > Settings > Channel > Feature eligibility, screenshot it, and compare it with the surface you’re trying to use above. Nine times out of ten the answer is either “that spot is blocked on purpose” or “that feature isn’t enabled yet.” Both have a clear next step.