How do I add captions to YouTube Shorts?

Three routes, and they are not equivalent.

Platform auto-captions are free and the weakest option: unstyled, frequently wrong on names and jargon, off by default on some surfaces, and positioned wherever the platform decides.

Editor-burned captions — CapCut, Submagic and similar — give you styling and placement control, at the cost of a manual pass on every video.

Captions generated with the video come out already burned in and timed. Leaxor does this, with word-level timing and placement inside the safe zone.

Whichever route you take, burn them into the frames rather than relying on a subtitle track. Short-form feeds are largely watched muted, so captions here are not an accessibility extra — they are how most of the audience receives the video at all.