YouTube to no longer recommend videos to users with disabled watch history

Users will see the search bar and the left-hand guide menu with no feed of recommended videos, allowing them to more easily search, browse subscribed channels and explore Topic tabs.

San Francisco: Google-owned YouTube has announced that it will no longer recommend videos to users if their watch history is turned off.

“Starting today, if you have YouTube watch history off and have no significant prior watch history, features that require watch history to provide video recommendations will be disabled – like your YouTube home feed,” the company said in a support page on Tuesday.

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This means that now users’ home feed may look a lot different. Users will see the search bar and the left-hand guide menu with no feed of recommended videos, allowing them to more easily search, browse subscribed channels and explore Topic tabs.

The company is rolling out this “new experience” to make it more clear which YouTube features rely on watch history to provide video recommendations, and to make it more streamlined for users who prefer to search rather than browse recommendations.

“You can change your YouTube watch history settings at any time based on whether you prefer us to provide video recommendations or not,” the platform said.

Last week, the video-sharing platform had announced that it was testing artificial intelligence (AI) auto-generated summaries. This feature will make it easier for users to read a quick summary about a video and decide whether it is the right fit for them. The company noted that these summaries do not replace video descriptions which are written by creators.

The Google-owned platform had also started testing improvements to the channel page layout.