YouTube recommends videos based on what you like.You can find recommendations across YouTube in places like:
- The YouTube homepage: The homepage is what you commonly see when you first open YouTube. When you’re signed in, the homepage displays a personalized mix of recommendations, subscriptions, and news. The homepage is primarily a personalized surface.
- Up Next: This appears when you’re watching a video and gives suggestions based on the video you're watching.
- The Shorts player: The Shorts player allows you to watch and interact with a stream of short-form vertical videos in the Shorts Feed. The Shorts Feed is personalized to reflect what we think you want to see next.
- Destination pages: Destination pages are dedicated to topics like Shopping, Music, and Movies and TV. Certain shelves on these pages may be personalized for you.
- Channel pages: Channel pages are spaces on YouTube where you can go to access content by a specific Creator. Certain shelves on channel pages may also be personalized to reflect what we think would interest you the most.
YouTube’s recommendation system
We start with the knowledge that everyone has unique viewing habits. Our system then compares your viewing habits with those that are similar to yours and uses that information to suggest other content you may want to watch.
Our recommendation system is constantly evolving, learning every day from over 80 billion pieces of information we call signals. The primary signals our system considers are:
- Watch history: The YouTube videos you’ve watched help to give you better recommendations, remember where you left off, and more.
- Search history: What you search on YouTube influences future recommendations.
- Channel subscriptions: The YouTube channels you’ve subscribed to help to recommend other videos you may like.
- Likes: The videos you’ve liked helps our system try to predict the likelihood that you will be interested in similar videos in the future.
- Dislikes: Our system uses videos you dislike to inform what to avoid recommending in the future.
- “Not interested” feedback selections: Videos you mark as “Not interested” helps to inform what to avoid recommending in the future.
- “Don’t recommend channel” feedback selections: Our system uses your “Don’t recommend channel” feedback selections as a signal that the channel content likely isn’t something you enjoyed watching.
- Satisfaction surveys: User surveys that ask you to rate videos that you watched helps the system understand satisfaction, not just watch time.
Different YouTube features rely on certain recommendation signals more than others. For example, our system uses the video you’re currently watching as the main signal when suggesting a video to play next. To provide video recommendations on the homepage, our system primarily relies on your watch history. You can turn off and delete your watch history if you don’t prefer to have video recommendations on the homepage.
If your YouTube watch history is off and you have no significant prior watch history, the homepage will continue to show the search bar and the left-side menu. This allows for a streamlined user experience with the ability to search, browse subscribed channels, and find trending videos in the Explore menu.