YouTube Wants You to Enable Watch History to Get Recommendations, but There’s a Workaround

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If you have your YouTube watch history disabled and you are now being prompted to turn it on if you want to receive recommendations, you're not alone. Watch history on YouTube is used to generate personalized recommendations on the platform—when it's disabled, suggested videos and channels are instead pulled from your likes, saves, and subscriptions rather than from videos you've watched. While some YouTube users want to be able to see a list of what they've viewed, many have watch history turned off for privacy reasons or to keep junk out of their algorithm in favor of a more curated experience.

Some Reddit users have recently reported that their recommendations have disappeared from the YouTube homepage, replaced with a prompt to enable their YouTube watch history. The issue doesn't appear to affect everyone whose watch history is turned off—those who have had it disabled for many years seem to be more likely to encounter the prompt. As Mashable points out, this may be an effort to gain access to search histories for ad targeting.

Manage your YouTube watch history

You may not have to give in and give up more data to get your recommendations back, and the workaround may be as simple as turning your watch history on, refreshing the page, or doing a search, and turning it off again. To try this out, in the YouTube app, tap your profile photo and go to Settings > Manage all history > Controls and select Include the YouTube videos you watch. Refresh your homepage, then follow the same steps to unselect the setting. (Note that Turn Off will disable history, including searches, entirely.) On a TV or gaming console, you'll find this under Settings > Pause watch history; on a browser, go to My Activity > Controls.

Even with watch history disabled, you can train your algorithm to produce better recommendations than whatever YouTube would otherwise suggest. The most basic tools are likes (and dislikes), subscriptions, and the bell, though you can also reject recommendations, create playlists, and even switch accounts to manage what you see.