Personalized Discover

Personalized Discover

Discover is the feed of fresh, interesting videos on your home page. Before you connect anything, it shows a curated, popular-leaning mix that's the same for everyone. Once you connect your YouTube account, Discover starts surfacing recent uploads from channels you follow and leaning toward what you actually watch, without you doing anything else.

What makes it personal

Discover blends a few private signals to put the videos you're more likely to enjoy nearer the top:

• Your YouTube subscriptions: recent uploads from channels you follow get mixed in, and those channels get a gentle lift.
• Your YouTube likes: the kinds of videos you've liked nudge similar ones up.
• Your activity in Vid Receipts: videos you heart, make receipts on, or watch.

So it does two things: it brings recent uploads from channels you follow into the mix, and it orders everything toward what you're more likely to enjoy. Those subscription uploads are only a slice of the feed, and a chunk of every Discover feed is deliberately held back for fresh, off-pattern picks, so you still get variety and don't get stuck in a loop.

Topic shelves

Discover also learns your top topics and can group some picks into a shelf for each one. It works out those topics from the subjects attached to the channels and videos you engage with (the channels you subscribe to, the videos you like, and the ones you make receipts on), then leans a little harder toward the handful of topics that come up most. When there isn't enough topic signal yet, or when the topic pool is thin, Discover quietly falls back to the blended feed above, so a cold start still looks full. Topic shelves only reorder and group what you see. They never show a score.

It stays fresh

Discover is for finding something new, so any video you've already watched or made a receipt on, however you got to it, whether from Discover or by opening a link, drops out of the running, along with videos you've already liked on YouTube. They've done their job as a signal. Videos you hearted in Vid Receipts stay eligible, because a heart means "show me more like this."

Surprise Me draws from the same personalized set, so the random button feels like you too. Pressing Surprise Me again is a soft "not that" - Discover takes the hint and leans into something different.

Your privacy

This all happens privately, for you alone:

• We never show you (or anyone else) a score, percentage, or ranking number built from your YouTube data. Discover only changes which videos appear and in what order - never a number.
• Your YouTube likes and subscriptions are private signals that shape Discover. They never appear as content, and your Loved list stays exactly what you hearted inside Vid Receipts.
• We never sell or share this data, and if you disconnect YouTube we delete the cached data within 30 days.

See Connect your YouTube account and Data & privacy for the full picture.

Turning it off

Personalization rides on your YouTube connection. To go back to the standard, non-personalized Discover, disconnect YouTube from Settings → YouTube. Your receipts and everything else are unaffected.

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