Mine comment sections for content ideas with AI

The best content ideas are already written down, by your audience, under someone else’s post. The questions nobody answered, the objection that got 400 likes, the way people describe the problem in their own words. The hard part is reading enough of them, and an AI that can only see the post itself won’t help.

With a connector that reads comments, it can. Here’s what that looks like on a real video.

A real run: 40 top comments on one video

On 27 October 2026 we pulled the top 40 comments on Kallaway’s How Social Media Algorithms Actually Work (1.2M views, 2.3K comments). The first lesson: the top of a comment section is mostly encouragement. “Good Luck to all small creators!” has 1.1K likes, and several more say the same. Tell the AI to skip those, because the useful signal sits in the longer comments and the replies.

Stories worth a video. The most liked comment that isn’t encouragement (1.5K likes): “I went viral with a trendy video that had no relevance to what I actually do, and it destroyed my account.” The replies add similar stories. That’s a ready-made “what happened when” post.

Questions people still have.

• “How do you define a niche for lifestyle creators whose content covers different parts of their lives, like food, routines, relationships, and skincare…?”
• “How can I add a thumbnail for Shorts videos? YouTube selects automatically a picture inside the video”
• “Man, the hardest part of this, i believe, is picking a niche.”

Pushback. “‘How to beat the algorithm’…. Apparently you means ‘doing exactly what the algorithm wants’”. And from another commenter: “I was stuck in 200 jail for a year on Tiktok until I started paying for ads.” Objections like these make good contrarian hooks.

Phrases to reuse. “people don’t stop for ‘good advice’. They stop for emotional relevance.” (443 likes)

Five content ideas from one comment section, each tied to a comment you can link.

The prompt

Read the top 100 comments on <link>. Skip comments that are only encouragement or self-promotion.
Give me:
1. The 10 questions people ask most, grouped where they overlap.
2. Objections and pushback.
3. Stories people tell about their own experience.
4. 10 exact phrases worth reusing in a hook or caption.
Quote people's exact words and put the link after each quote. Say how many comments you read.

It works on any of these links, and the AI picks the right tool:

Go wider than one post

One comment section shows what one audience thinks about one video. For a theme, read three to five: the top videos on a topic, or the last month’s posts from two competitors.

Search YouTube for "<topic>" videos from the last 30 days, take the 3 most viewed, and read the top
50 comments on each. What do people ask that none of the videos answered?

The unanswered questions are the strongest ideas, because the demand is visible and the supply isn’t.

Set it up

Add Scrollhound to Claude or ChatGPT as a connector (about two minutes), then paste any of the prompts above. The Mine the comments recipe has the prompt ready to copy, and in Claude you can pick it from the prompts menu.