Here’s all you need to know about viewing, deleting, and pausing your watch history on YouTube.
a person holding a phone with the youtube app and the youtube website in the background
Nopparat Khokthong/Shutterstock
Quick Links
How to See Your YouTube Watch History
How to Clear Your Watch History on YouTube
How to Pause Your YouTube Watch History
Key Takeaways
You can access your YouTube watch history under the You tab on the website or app.
The app and website include the ability to clear all videos from your history or you can select specific videos you want to remove.
Users can also pause the watch history on YouTube to prevent videos from affecting future recommendations.
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Your YouTube watch history is a useful way to keep track of the videos you’ve viewed on the platform, but sometimes it can interfere with your recommendations. Here’s how to find your watch history on the website and app and how to manage it by clearing or pausing it.
How to See Your YouTube Watch History
To manage your YouTube watch history, you first need to access it. Luckily doing so is really easy.
If you’re using the YouTube website, check the menu on the left and under the You tab, select History.
you tab on youtube with history option
On the YouTube mobile app, the option is slightly more buried. To access your watch history on the app, select the You tab at the bottom of your screen. This takes you to a page with your History and Playlists. To access your history, select the View all button next to History.
From this page you can access various options to manage your history, such as clearing your history or pausing the history.
How to Clear Your Watch History on YouTube
Sometimes you’ll want to clear your watch history. You may want to do this for privacy reasons, but deleting something from your watch history also prevents YouTube from recommending similar videos.
Once again, the process is more straightforward on the YouTube website. On the right, you’ll see the option to Clear all watch history. Click on this and then confirm to YouTube that you want to reset your video recommendations and clear your watch history from all apps and devices.
clear watch history option on youtube website
If you only want to remove a single video from your history, hover over the video and select the X icon to delete it.
If you’re using the YouTube mobile app, you will need to tap on the three dots at the top of the screen and select Clear all watch history. Like on the website, you will need to confirm that you want to clear your history by selecting the option to Clear watch history again.
To remove a single video from your history on the app, tap on the three dots next to a video and select Remove from watch history in the menu that pops up.
Using this option is one of the ways you can get rid of irrelevant YouTube recommendations.
How to Pause Your YouTube Watch History
Pausing your YouTube watch history makes sure that whatever you’re planning to watch isn’t stored in your history and used for recommendations. You can also use it if someone else is using your account to watch videos and you don’t want their videos to affect your recommendations.
On the YouTube website, you can select the option to Pause watch history on the right of the screen. You will need to confirm your decision by selecting Pause in the popup menu. When you want to resume your watch history, select the option to Turn on watch history.
pause watch history on youtube website
To pause your watch history on the YouTube mobile app, select the three dots at the top of the app on your history page. Then select Pause watch history. Once you have confirmed that you want to pause your watch history, a new banner will appear at the top of the history page which lets you turn it back on. Use the Turn on option whenever you want your history to resume.
There is also the option to stop YouTube from tracking your activity on the website and app if you don’t want it to store any of your watch history. Managing your history is easy enough as long as you know which menus to access. Hopefully, now you have all the information you need to keep your YouTube watch history managed and remove anything that is messing up your recommendations.
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