Overview
- At its Made on YouTube event on Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2026, YouTube announced a coordinated set of viewer and creator features that will roll out in phases through late 2026 and into 2027.
- Viewers in the U.S. will soon get Custom Feeds—saved homepage tabs built from natural-language prompts—and an expanded Ask YouTube that can handle shopping queries, produce product comparison tables, and accept voice commands on TVs.
- Creators will see Studio updates such as Ask Studio on mobile, AI feedback on unpublished drafts, dynamic thumbnails, and A/B testing of up to three video cuts, with a conversational Gemini-powered editor for Shorts and YouTube Create arriving in early 2027.
- YouTube is adding TV-first features including Posts on TV, Shorts Series with sequential playback, and voice comment input via remotes, and the company says recordings from TV remote comments will not be used to train Google models.
- Commerce and safety updates include expanding the YouTube Shopping affiliate program to 35 countries by year-end, Amazon product tagging in select markets, mobile likeness-enrollment and match alerts, and opt-in AI moderation controls.