How to turn off and delete your YouTube watch history

Many app homepages have gotten incredibly busy, filled with suggestions and ads, many based on your previous searches or stuff you’ve read / written / watched in the past. YouTube is certainly no exception — in fact, it’s one of the worst offenders — but recently, Google’s video service announced that users now have a choice. If you turn your watch history off and “have no significant prior watch history,” all that confusion will disappear, and your homepage will only show the search bar and the Shorts, Subscriptions, and Library buttons.

In other words, you’ll have a clean, simple, easy-on-the-eyes YouTube page.

The change in the home feed is being slowly rolled out over the next few months, but it doesn’t hurt to be ready for it. The process is nearly identical for both the web version and mobile versions of YouTube. Here’s how.

If you really want to clean up your YouTube page, you do need to delete that history — because otherwise, you’ll still be getting recommendations based on everything you watched before you hit that Pause button.

If you didn’t take advantage of the pop-up’s Delete old activity link, you can still go back and delete your history.

There is a good chance that, despite all this, you would still not see much of a change in your recommendations. (I was certainly still seeing a lot of recommendations.) According to Google, the changes in YouTube are only being rolled out over the next few months, so it may be a while before you see a change in your YouTube homepage. But at least you’ll be ready.