How to search YouTube by date or date range

Guide

YouTube’s own filters offer presets such as “Today” or “This week,” but not a custom date range like “April 2025 only.” With Good Luck Search for YouTube, you can set a start and end date and build a search URL for older videos or videos from a specific time.

Steps to search by date range

Enter what you are looking for in “Keywords” of the search tool. For example: Kyoto walk.
Set “From” and “To” under “Upload date.”
Select “Search” to open the YouTube results in a new tab.

You can set only a start date or only an end date. To find videos from one specific day, use the same date for both.

What after: and before: mean

In the YouTube search box, adding after:2025-03-31 (later than this date) or before:2025-05-01 (earlier than this date) to your keywords filters by upload date. To include the dates you enter, this tool adds the day before your start date as after: and the day after your end date as before:.

For example, searching “Kyoto walk” from April 1 to April 30, 2025 produces Kyoto walk after:2025-03-31 before:2025-05-01.

Common uses

Find older videos

To look for videos from many years ago, set only an end date. For example, an end date of December 31, 2015 targets videos uploaded on or before that day. This helps when you look for past events, old shows, or early gameplay videos.

Find videos from a specific year or month

For a year, set January 1 as the start and December 31 as the end. For a month, use the first and last day of that month.

Find recent videos

Choose “Today,” “Past 7 days,” “Past 30 days,” or “Past year” to set a date range at once. Each range includes today; “Past year” covers 365 days.

Notes

Date handling depends on YouTube and time zones, so results may not match the date range exactly. after: and before: are not documented by YouTube and may stop working. If conditions are not applied, see the troubleshooting section of the guide.

To find older videos from one channel, see the channel search guide.