How Do I Stop Youtube From Recommending Videos I Already Watched?

YouTube's recommendations are usually helpful, as they help you find more you'll like among the billions of videos on the service. But sometimes YouTube recommendations can go bad and show you suggestions that you have no interest in.

If you're sick of this, we'll show you how to reset and pause YouTube recommendations, plus share tips on how to get better recommendations.

What Influences Your YouTube Recommendations?

Before we look at how to reset or change YouTube recommendations, it's useful to know how YouTube actually comes up with these suggestions. YouTube's recommended videos info page explains that the service uses "many signals" to determine what's recommended.

These include your watch history, search history, and channels you're subscribed to. More general factors, like where you live and the time of day, can also affect recommendations.

This illustrates the general principle that YouTube is going to show you more of whatever it thinks you like. YouTube's goal is to keep you watching videos for as long as possible, so that it keeps making money from ads. Assuming you're signed into your Google account, which the below steps cover, it does this by using the information it has about you. But even if you're not signed in, YouTube uses cookies to keep track of what you like.

Keep in mind that there are various levels of recommended videos. The YouTube homepage is a mix of what it thinks you're into, but you'll also see suggested videos to the right of the player when you have a video open. These are related to what you're currently watching, so if you have a mix of music up, another video full of music in that genre will probably be the first recommendation.

How to Reset YouTube Recommendations

If you want to totally clear out your YouTube recommendations, deleting the information YouTube has about your interests will serve this purpose. By resetting both your search history and watch history on YouTube, you can effectively revert your YouTube interests to a blank slate. This will allow you to re-teach YouTube what you're interested in.

Without any history, the YouTube recommendation algorithm won't know what you've watched in the past. As a side bonus, deleting your YouTube logs also deletes all those "guilty pleasure" video searches you don't want to become public.

Here's how to delete your YouTube history:

Click your username at the top-right of any YouTube page.
In the menu that appears, click Your Data In YouTube.
Scroll down to find YouTube Search History and click the field labeled Manage your YouTube Search History.
Click the Delete button underneath the Search your activity bar. In the resulting window, choose All time to delete everything associated with your account, then confirm.

Keep in mind that doing this will delete both watch history and search history on YouTube. Google's activity page now puts these in the same list, and there's no way to delete just your search history or only your watch history. As a result, clicking Manage your YouTube Watch History under YouTube Watch History in the above steps will bring you to the same menu.

Also, you don't have to delete the entirety of your history. The Last hour and Last day options are handy if, for example, a child watched a bunch of videos you don't care about while signed into your YouTube account. For more control, choose Custom range and define exactly when you want to delete history from.

Google provides an automated history deletion option if you want to clear your recommendations every so often. To access it, click Auto-delete on the YouTube History page. There, you can choose to automatically erase any history older than three, 18, or 36 months.

Note that after deleting your YouTube history, you might still need to wait a while for YouTube's recommendations to reset. Sometimes they won't reset even after you clear everything, but this is rare.

How to Stop YouTube Recommendations

Clearing your YouTube history will set your recommendations back to default. But over time, YouTube will learn your interests again, which could result in the same problem you originally had. If you want to permanently prevent YouTube from using what you watch to provide suggestions, you can disable watch and search history.

To do this, click your profile icon in the top-right of YouTube and choose Your Data In YouTube again. Scroll down to YouTube Watch History and click the field labeled On. There, you can disable the slider for YouTube History (then confirm) to block all history from saving to your account.

For something less drastic, you can instead uncheck either the Include the YouTube videos you watch or Include your searches on YouTube box. These will prevent your watch and search history from being used to influence recommendations.

Remember that YouTube still recommends videos when you do this; it just doesn't use your past behavior to do so. You'll see recommendations based on the current video, your location, trends, and similar.

Disable YouTube Recommendation Notifications on Mobile

While we've focused on changing the videos YouTube recommends to you, there's another way to interpret turning off recommended videos on YouTube.

In YouTube's mobile apps for Android and iPhone, there's an option for YouTube to send you notifications about all kinds of information. This includes videos that YouTube recommends for you. If you want to cut down on annoying pings, this is an easy one to disable.

To disable recommended video notifications in the YouTube mobile app, open the app and select the Home tab at the bottom. Tap your profile picture at the top-right, then choose Settings in the list of options. Choose Notifications to see a list of pings that YouTube can send you, then disable the slider for Recommended videos to prevent these from appearing.

Remember that this will only disable the notifications on your phone; it won't turn off recommendations across YouTube.

How to Get Better YouTube Recommendations

To avoid getting bad recommendations on YouTube in the future, you can put a few tips into action.

First, if you see a recommendation that you don't like, you can tell YouTube you're not interested. Just click the three-dot menu on a video and hit Not interested to tell YouTube that you don't care about that topic. On the homepage, you can also click Don't recommend channel if you want to avoid all recommendations from that uploader.

Next, remember that you have options if you watch a few videos that are out of your usual interests. On the YouTube History page mentioned earlier, you can click the X button next to any video to remove it from your history. In YouTube's search bar, click Remove next to an item to erase it.

If you don't want particular videos you're watching to influence your recommendations, use a private browsing window to browse YouTube without logging into your account.

And while this might sound obvious, you should keep your YouTube account for just you. Letting someone else watch YouTube using your account is going to send mixed signals to what you like, resulting in inconsistent recommendations. Ask anyone else who uses your account to use their own instead. On non-web platforms, like the YouTube app for smart TVs, it's easy to sign in a separate account.

Finally, keep watching videos that you're interested in on YouTube. The more you tell the service what you like, the better recommendations it can give you.

How to Completely Remove YouTube Recommendations

If resetting your YouTube recommendations isn't enough for you, it's possible to go a step further. Why not remove YouTube recommendations entirely? This nuclear option is best if you never want to see or use YouTube recommended videos. Just keep in mind that this can make the service a lot less useful.

The quickest and safest way to remove YouTube recommendations is via a browser extension, meaning that there's no easy way to remove YouTube recommendations on other platforms like the mobile or TV apps. YouTube recommendation-blocking browser extensions are available for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and other popular browsers, and include the following.

1. Unhook

Unhook is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Once installed, the extension removes the YouTube recommendations sidebar, up-next video, and the video suggestions that appear once a video is done. It even hides everything on the YouTube homepage by default.

By opening the extension's menu, you can toggle its options to show some of these elements, or hide others like the comments and video info. Unhook is easy to use, works well, and is an effective way to reduce distractions on YouTube.

2. Remove YouTube Suggestions

This is an open-source Firefox extension that, by default, hides the YouTube homepage, end-of-video suggested content, and the recommendations sidebar. You can use the extension options to select which elements you want to remove, and which to keep (if any). In addition to the above, you can hide video comments, info cards, and similar. Unlike Unhook, this extension does not turn off autoplay.

3. ImprovedTube

ImprovedTube is a slightly different take on removing YouTube recommendations. Instead of hiding everything, the ImprovedTube helps you hide specific elements of the YouTube page. For instance, you can hide the footer, related videos, comments, live chat, and more.

ImprovedTube goes a lot further, though. Aside from changing the interface, it also adds tons of useful options like setting the default playback speed, handy shortcuts, loudness normalization, and similar. If you're a YouTube fanatic, it makes the site much more customizable.

Train YouTube to Show Better Recommendations

Now you know how to control the recommendations you see on YouTube. Whether you want to reset YouTube's recommendations and start fresh, disable recommendations based on your preferences, or hide recommended videos entirely, you have options. You can bend YouTube's slew of videos to what you desire to get out of the service.

Meanwhile, there are tons of other great ways to get more out of YouTube.

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