YouTube Custom Feeds Let Viewers Type What They Want

YouTube began rolling out custom feeds on October 22, 2026, to signed-in viewers in the United States, letting each viewer describe in plain words the videos they want to see and save that request as a feed pinned to the top of Home. The announcement came in a post from TeamYouTube in the YouTube Help Community, backed by two updated Help Center pages. A viewer without a Premium subscription can keep three custom feeds at a time, while a Premium member can keep eight. The same announcement redesigns the top bar of the mobile app, moving the subscriptions feed onto the Home tab under the shorter name Subs.

The rollout follows a test that began in May 2026, when an account could hold a single prompt-built feed. The October version keeps the United States and English limits from that test but widens the allowance and adds the top bar changes. For creators, the shift matters because part of what viewers see on Home may now come from requests they typed themselves rather than from viewing history alone.

How a typed request becomes a feed

On a phone, the entry point is a plus sign at the top of Home. A viewer taps it and types a topic, a set of channels, or a mood they are looking for. The announcement gives one example request: help me unwind after work with guided meditations under 10 minutes. On a computer, a viewer goes to the Home tab, selects Custom feed at the top left, types a prompt or picks a suggested prompt button, and presses Enter. YouTube describes the result as dedicated spaces for specific topics that stay anchored to the Home screen.

Custom feeds follow the account across devices, so a feed created on a phone appears on desktop as long as the viewer signs in with the same Google account. A viewer can rewrite a feed by opening it and entering a new prompt in the text box at its top. Refreshing a feed generates new recommendations from the prompt, and some videos stay while others change. A prompt that goes unused expires after 30 days of inactivity, and the feed then disappears until the viewer writes a new one.

Prompts must follow the YouTube Community Guidelines, and some prompts may be refused under those policies. Each prompt carries thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons so viewers can flag a feed that misread their request. Custom feeds are private to the account, and other viewers cannot find or open them. Videos watched through a custom feed still land in the standard watch history, and those watches may influence the main Home recommendations afterward.

Eligibility is narrow for now. According to the announcement, custom feeds are rolling out on mobile and desktop in English to United States based, signed-in viewers aged 13 years or older with search history enabled. The Help pages add that the device language must be set to English. Viewers who pause watch history lose more than the custom feeds: the Help pages say the feeds and the top bar are not visible when watch history is paused or turned off. Custom feeds are also not available on tablets, even though the announcement describes the rollout as covering mobile and desktop.

A new top bar on the mobile app

The second half of the announcement concerns navigation. The redesigned top bar holds the standard Home feed, the renamed Subs feed showing the newest content from subscribed channels, a Live feed for recommended and subscribed live streams, and a Music feed for recommended music videos. A Movies and TV feed gathers Primetime Channel subscriptions, YouTube TV add-ons, rentals, purchases, and film and television recommendations, but it appears in the top bar only for viewers with active Primetime Channel subscriptions or YouTube TV add-ons. Everyone else finds it in the More menu, alongside destination pages for Gaming, Podcasts, Playables, and Memberships.

Moving Subs onto the Home tab is a structural change for channels that rely on the subscriptions view for early views. The announcement frames the move as keeping favorite creators front and center, but it does not say where the old Subscriptions entry in the bottom navigation goes. Unlike custom feeds, the top bar redesign carries no stated country or language restriction in the post, and reactions under the announcement suggest it is reaching viewers outside the United States. One commenter wrote that the category buttons they used regularly were gone from their app.

What it changes for creators

For channels, the key passage sits in a Help page answer about how custom feeds behave. According to that answer, the feature behaves like the Home feed: when a viewer discovers and watches a video through a custom feed, the watch contributes to the creator watch time and monetisation as usual. YouTube says it is continuing to monitor the effect on views, watch time, and revenue. The Help page gives no figures from the May test on how many viewers built a custom feed or how traffic from those feeds compared with the standard Home feed, and it does not say whether custom feeds appear as a separate traffic source in YouTube Analytics or are folded into browse features. Without that breakdown, channels cannot tell whether a prompt-driven feed is sending them viewers or routing viewers elsewhere.

Meta added a comparable typed-request control for Facebook Feed and Reels in October 2026, which suggests viewers steering recommendations with written requests is becoming a wider pattern rather than a single-company experiment. YouTube says it is actively working on bringing custom feeds to more users and regions in the future, but it gives no dates for that expansion. For now, the change gives American viewers a direct way to ask for what they want, and it gives creators a new route to viewers that runs on words rather than watch history. Related creator-economy moves covered on this site include Spotify podcast memberships that let fans pay creators directly and an agent email tool that lets AI agents answer replies.

Reporting on the rollout is drawn from the TeamYouTube announcement and the updated Help Center pages, summarized by PPC Land.