Your YouTube description link is not a backlink.

YouTube rewrites every outbound link.

The href a user or a crawler encounters is not your domain. It is a youtube.com address carrying your destination inside it as a parameter, alongside an event type and a redirect token. Something shaped like:

youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=…&q=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Fpage

Click it and you also land on an interstitial warning page before you reach the destination.

So nofollow versus ugc is the wrong argument.

A rel attribute qualifies a link to a destination. There is no link to your destination on the page to qualify. A decade of agency slides have been arguing about which attribute YouTube applies to something that is not there.

If a proposal promises "backlinks from YouTube to your site" as an SEO deliverable, it is promising something that does not exist. The work behind it can still be worth buying. It has to be described accurately.

What is real: traffic, entities, and a URL an AI can retype.

Referral traffic. People do click. The link works as a link for humans, interstitial and all.

Entity co-occurrence. Your brand, product names and domain appearing together in indexed description text is a legitimate signal for an engine building an association between your organization and a topic. It is text, not link equity.

Reproducible URLs. A language model composing an answer will retype example.com/go/gnss-basics. It will never retype a 180-character tracking string. Short branded URLs are the only kind that survive being spoken back to you by an assistant.

Score your Video for AI Findability →

YouTube cannot measure the click. You have to.

YouTube Analytics has no description-link click metric at all, which surprises most teams the first time they go looking. If you want the number, the measurement lives on your side: a distinct short branded URL per video, or per family of videos, read from your own analytics.

This also means there is no public benchmark for description-link click-through rate. If someone quotes you one, ask where it came from.

Two to four deep links, never the homepage.

One primary call to action high, inside the first 120 characters, on a short branded URL so it survives truncation on every surface. Then two to four deep links lower down. Every extra link dilutes the value of the others and adds another URL to maintain when the site changes.

Point at the page that owns the answer. If you have built a watch page for the video on your own domain, with the transcript as text and video schema in the head, that is the link that compounds.

Links are not clickable by default.

Clickable links in long-form descriptions require Advanced features on the channel, granted per channel after ID or video verification (YouTube Help). Links in Shorts descriptions are non-clickable regardless (YouTube Help). And YouTube's external links policy covers spoken and on-screen URLs, not only the description field (YouTube Help).

The objective is routing, not authority.

You are not trying to pass authority from YouTube to your domain, because that channel does not exist. You are trying to make sure that when an engine or a person leaves the video with a question, the page that answers it is yours, is short enough to be reproduced from memory, and carries the schema that lets an engine understand what it is looking at.