YouTube is giving viewers the keys to their homepage. The video platform has started rolling out Custom Feeds, a feature that turns a natural-language prompt into a persistent, self-refreshing recommendation tab, alongside the biggest mobile redesign YouTube has attempted in years. US viewers are the first to see it, with more countries to follow.
The rollout began this week after YouTube announced the changes in a Community post. The new feeds sit at the top of the Home tab, next to the regular Home feed, and sync between mobile and desktop for signed-in users.
Custom Feeds Turn A Prompt Into A Tab
Creating a Custom Feed starts with the “+” button at the top of the Home feed. Viewers describe what they want to watch in their own words — YouTube’s example is “help me unwind after work with guided meditations under 10 minutes” — and the platform generates a feed around that description.
The prompt can name topics, channels, moods, formats or things to exclude, and the feeds refresh automatically as new videos are uploaded. Each feed lives as its own top tab after Home and Subs, and a prompt box at the top of the feed lets viewers edit the description at any time to steer the recommendations.
The system is powered by Google’s Gemini AI, which is being pushed into more surfaces, and it interprets the prompt and maps it to YouTube’s catalogue of more than 20 billion videos. Free users can keep up to three active Custom Feeds, while YouTube Premium members can keep up to eight. Prompts expire after 30 days of inactivity. To create a feed, viewers need watch and search history enabled and must be 13 or older.
Subscriptions Move To The Top Bar After Nearly A Decade
The homepage redesign that accompanies Custom Feeds reshuffles YouTube’s mobile navigation. The Subscriptions tab is leaving the fourth position in the bottom bar, where it has sat since 2017, and moving to the second position in the new top bar, right after Home, branded as “Subs” with a red underline.
The new top bar also carries dedicated feeds for Live and Music, plus a Movies & TV feed that appears for viewers with active subscriptions such as Primetime Channels. The change removes the navigation drawer, and the bottom bar is simplified to four buttons: Home, Shorts, Create and Profile.
Testing of the redesign started earlier this year, so some users may already have seen parts of it. But the full combination — the top-bar navigation plus Custom Feeds — is only now rolling out, starting on mobile and desktop in English for US-based, signed-in viewers.
Why It Matters
YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is famously a black box: you watch one video and it haunts your homepage for months. Custom Feeds are the first explicit control YouTube has given viewers over what the algorithm serves them, turning recommendations from something inferred silently from behaviour into something requested deliberately.
For viewers, the practical effect is a homepage organised around intent rather than history — a feed for the commute, one for winding down, one for a specific hobby — each refreshing on its own. For creators, the feeds could redistribute discovery: a video matched to someone’s written intent may reach viewers who would never have surfaced it through algorithmic suggestion.
The free-versus-Premium split — three feeds versus eight — is also YouTube’s latest way to make Premium membership feel materially different from the free tier, following the pattern of gating AI features behind the paid plan.
Background
Custom Feeds were announced at YouTube’s Made on YouTube event in September 2026 as the flagship viewer-facing AI feature of the year, alongside an expanded Ask YouTube search tool and new creator features. The rollout completes YouTube’s shift toward prompt-based control: Ask YouTube lets viewers interrogate videos with natural language, and Custom Feeds now let them define their own recommendation streams the same way.
YouTube’s homepage has relied on algorithmic recommendations and predefined topic shortcuts for years. The new layout is the company’s first admission that viewers want direct, legible control over the recommendation engine — a shift that echoes the AI-generated summaries appearing in Google’s AI Overviews, another sign of Google pushing natural-language AI into every surface, from Gemini’s small-business tools to the search results page itself.
Source: 9to5Google ; Thurrott
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