I stopped trusting YouTube's algorithm after one curious click destroyed my entire feed

Published Jul 17, 2026, 9:30 AM EDT I am an author and features writer at Android Police. I primarily writes guides, how-tos, and roundups on the latest smartphone apps and features for Android Police since joining the team in early 2022. While my work often diversifies depending on the topic, you'll often find me writing about the newest entertainment or hidden utility Android apps or discussing my paranoia about digital privacy and poor smartphone practices. I will occasionally dabble in Samsung's latest features in One UI. On the games side, my area of expertise is in action RPGs and gacha games, but I will play and study the occasional competitive shooter. But most of all, my appetite for new stories still goes unquenched — as shown with my personal love for the Trails series. Before joining Android Police, I studied chemistry and graduated with an honors specialization in Chemistry in 2016, leading me to spend many hours toiling around the lab as an undergraduate. Eventually, all those hours spent at the lab led me to develop my analytical mindset. So now, if you give me a problem, I will relentlessly tackle it to find a solution. My favorite pastime as a student was always writing reports, presentations, tutorials, and literature reviews, which guided me into completing a graduate certificate in technical writing in 2019. Thanks to my current role with Android Police, I learned to appreciate user security and privacy, leading me into studying Cyber Security. My first Android phone was the Samsung Galaxy Note II in 2012, which gave me a taste of how a small piece of powerful hardware can open up endless opportunities for my favorite hobbies. Though if you ask about my purchasing regrets, I will always say missing out on the Google Nexus still stings to this very day. I've also been a gamer for over 20 years, starting with Super Mario Bros. on the NES. Thanks to those early influences, I now own over 15 devices for gaming, ranging from handhelds to consoles. Nowadays, you'll find me studying spreadsheets and assembling data to theorycraft new teams and builds for Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, Wuthering Waves, and Zenless Zone Zero. You'll also see me digging deeper to uncover the truth behind AI as a field: which part is actually useful, or it just a bunch of bloat being sold with your phone? I open my dedicated YouTube account and watch a video on the design analysis of one of my favorite games. I find another video in the sidebar that shows a major graphical project for a PlayStation 1 title. Immediately, I am drawn to the thumbnail, and I click it. The entire video was AI-generated. Now I open my YouTube feed, and I find more videos like it. But this isn't a one-off; it happens with many of the videos I watch, even if I only check them out for a few seconds before turning them off. My feed then gets filled with similar videos. In this case, no matter where I watch YouTube — on my Chromebook, phone, or TV — the curiosity sometimes kills the cat. So, to prevent further destruction of my recommended feed, I have to watch YouTube in my browser's incognito mode or in the YouTube app. Though it's not a perfect solution for everyone, since you can lose your YouTube Premium benefits when you don't stay signed in to your profile — which is why careful management of the platform becomes far more worthwhile. I miss discoverability on YouTube This was the app I spent a lot of time on Credit: Lucas Gouveia / Android Police YouTube is one of my favorite apps, at least it used to be. But I find it more difficult to maneuver when I get interrupted by ads (there are unofficial ways to stop seeing ads easily, but I split my time across different devices) and have to be extra careful about how I watch my videos. But this is where I watch and discover my favorite content creators, my news curators, and people who break down the technical jargon of what's happening in the industry so that I can become more informed. I even used the platform to catch up on politics and watch live channels. It was a place where I felt like I could explore multiple interests without worry. But now, if I check out different videos, like one for my hobbies and a few tech reviews in between, the algorithm punishes it, even if I spend more time in one area versus the others. I sometimes listen to AI-produced music mixes. My entire feed gets riddled with them, almost making it impossible to find random tech breakdown videos or theory-crafting VODs for my games. This isn't just a YouTube problem. I had that issue with Spotify too. But at the very least, my interests are much more centralized on Spotify than in my YouTube app. I even considered creating another dedicated YouTube account to separate the types of content to watch, but I don't really want to keep track of the different ones I watch. So instead, I gave up and now use incognito mode in my web browser or in the YouTube app so I can search for what I want to watch without expectations. If you are on a smart TV, use a Guest profile for YouTube to browse content without being linked to a specific YouTube account. I started to manage my YouTube account more closely Scrubbing my watch and search history Credit: Lucas Gouveia / Android Police I didn't expect to need to go to such lengths to fix my YouTube algorithm, but I'm now removing videos I only watched briefly before moving on and being more careful about whether to like them. I had to do this on other YouTube accounts. There were a few instances in which someone in my family left their YouTube account on the smart TV. I didn't think twice about watching videos related to my hobbies until later, when I received complaints that their feeds were related to video games and hardware breakdowns. So I cleaned up my Watch History first and then my Search History. It's simple to do and takes only a few minutes of your time, unless you're doing a manual deep clean. Essentially, when you are signed in, click or tap the Profile icon, then choose Settings (some devices won't need this step). From there, select Your data on YouTube, then scroll down to Manage your YouTube Watch History or Manage your YouTube Search History. In either menu, you can select Auto-delete. I don't do this since I don't mind saving my history and would prefer a more in-depth profile of my account, but you can set it to remove your watch or search history after 36 months or less. YouTube Premium users can use the Pausing Watch History feature to temporarily avoid saving their history. In the Manage your YouTube Watch History or Manage your YouTube Search History section, you can click or tap to remove any of them with the "X" option by the date or by the individual entry. You'll see a prompt confirming the deletion of that specific date or entry. The next option is to change your YouTube History sub-settings to reduce what's saved or used by the algorithm. You do this by navigating to Controls in the left panel. From there, you can check or uncheck three options: Include the YouTube videos you watch Include your searches on YouTube Include YouTube voice and audio activity I keep Include YouTube voice and audio activity unchecked since I normally search YouTube with Alexa using my remote for my Fire TV. The other one I sometimes uncheck is searching on YouTube, since I can be all over the place about what I'm looking for. That's when I notice I am not always on the right profile to do it unless I am in incognito mode. After a bit of time, I noticed that the more careful I was with how I used YouTube, the more streamlined my feed became. It can take a little time for your feed to return to normal if you're a heavy user. Another recommendation is to use Not interested or Don't recommend this channel when you're browsing the YouTube home page (click or tap the three dots next to a video to see these options). It has helped me avoid certain content creators and see "ragebait" videos less often in my feed. It's not perfect, but it does help. Google keeps track of more than your YouTube history Anything that uses Google Analytics — your search queries while signed in to a profile, your AI interactions — is being recorded by Google. To get a better view of what Google has kept track of, go to your Google Profile, choose Manage your Google Account, and navigate to Data & privacy. From there, you can check your personalization settings and activity to see exactly what has been recorded and even delete it. I recommend keeping tabs on and cleaning up what you don't want Google to see, even if you only review your Google account activity a few times a month — it is worth it!