YouTube Custom Feeds Let You Build Your Own Algorithm

YouTube is about to let you build your own recommendations. At its annual Made on YouTube event in New York City on September 23, 2026, the company unveiled YouTube custom feeds, a feature that lets viewers describe the videos they want recommended in their own words, according to TechCrunch.

How YouTube custom feeds work

The setup is simple. You type a description of what you want into a prompt box, and Google's Gemini AI model builds a feed around the request. The resulting feed is pinned to the top of the YouTube home page in its own tab, sitting next to the regular recommendations. Because the curation is AI powered, the request can be long and specific. You can say what to include and what to leave out, which topics to prioritize, and how you want the results sorted, as TechCrunch reported.

YouTube offered two examples of how it expects people to use the tool. One is a feed of video podcasts sized for a 30-minute train commute. The other is a request for relaxing commentary videos to unwind with in the evening. The pitch is that a feed you wrote down in a sentence is easier to understand and revise than one shaped by months of watch history.

The control goes further than a single line. Viewers can name the creators or topics they want prioritized, the kinds of content they want excluded entirely, and the order they want results in. The point is to move from inferred intent, where the platform guesses from watch history and session behavior, to declared intent, where you say what you want and the system finds it. You can keep several feeds at once, which suits narrow prompts better than one master feed tuned for everything. That matters on a service where the default feed mixes your music taste with a true-crime binge and your little cousin's cartoon history into a single scroll.

Why YouTube is doing it now

YouTube is not the first platform to hand feed-building to users. Bluesky popularized the idea of custom feeds years ago, and earlier this year it rolled out an AI tool called Attie that makes building them easier. Since then, Threads, Instagram, X, and Spotify have each launched their own feed-building features, many of them powered by AI as well, according to TechCrunch. YouTube is now bringing the same idea to the largest video audience on the internet.

The scale of what the feature has to sort through helps explain the timing. Emily Moxley, YouTube's vice president of product management for Viewer AI, told reporters that there are more than 20 billion videos in the YouTube corpus, calling the breadth of the library a treasure trove for viewers. A prompt-based feed, in her account, is the company's way of making a catalog that size feel navigable again.

When the feature arrives

YouTube custom feeds will not replace the platform's main feed, which keeps recommending as it always has. YouTube says support for building multiple custom feeds will roll out starting next month on web and mobile. Reuters reports that U.S. users will get the feature across web, mobile and TV, where it will let them save homepage tabs tailored to interests such as documentaries and DIY videos.

The announcement came as part of a broader slate at the event, which included AI editing tools for Shorts, an expansion of the YouTube Shopping affiliate program, and opt-in AI comment moderation, according to Reuters. But the YouTube custom feeds announcement drew the most attention, since it is a rare platform change aimed at how people watch rather than how creators make.

For anyone whose home page has filled up with videos they watched once out of curiosity, the draw is easy to see. The open question is how well Gemini handles a vague prompt, and whether viewers will keep maintaining the feeds they create. Those answers start arriving next month, when the YouTube custom feeds rollout begins.