Summary
- YouTube’s homepage no longer shows video recommendations for new, logged out users.
- Recommendations appear after watching a few videos, tailored to your interests, making the feed more relevant.
- The change seems to be widely available regardless of location.
YouTube’s homepage is usually filled with recommendations when you first visit the website. If you’re logged in or if you’ve built a local history, these videos can often be genuinely interesting to you. That’s usually not the case when you first visit the entertainment website without being logged in. It looks like Google finally understands that, as YouTube has stopped showing any video recommendations at all for new, logged out users.
When you visit the YouTube homepage in an incognito tab or without an active login, you’re now presented with an empty page and a banner that says, “Try searching to get started — Start watching videos to help us build a feed of videos you’ll love.” And that’s exactly how it works. In our testing, the homepage started filling with recommendations after we watched two to three videos, with content specifically tailored to what you looked at. Bleeping Computer, which discovered the change, also experiences the same behavior in its testing.
While you might think that the new behavior is regionally limited due to privacy laws like Europe’s GDPR or California’s CCPA, we’ve been able to recreate the empty homepage in multiple locations using a VPN. This makes it likely that the new homepage is available widely.
YouTube previously tested turning off recommendations for some
It looks like the platform has found the right balance
The empty homepage will likely be a welcome change for many people. In the past, the homepage usually showed a few trending videos that may not be relevant to the person looking at YouTube at all. And those that would still like to start their YouTube journey with recommended content can still find it in the Explore options in the sidebar, including Trending.
Google previously stopped showing recommendations for signed in users who have their watch history turned off. However, the company had a change of heart and re-introduced recommendations for all signed in users at the end of 2023, acknowledging that it happened in error. The removal of recommended videos for signed out users without a watch history may be what the company aimed for from the get-go, and it’s possible that it’s been like that for a longer time now.
