Overview
- Test participants see a “Your Custom Feed” chip next to Home that opens a box for short prompts guiding what appears on the homepage.
- The trial is restricted to a small group of users, and YouTube has not explained how prompts are processed or how strongly they influence results.
- Reports say the prompts can push recommendations toward specified topics even when watch history shows weak signals for those interests.
- This approach differs from YouTube’s 2024 customization tool that relied on upvoting and downvoting sample videos, using AI-driven prompts instead.
- The experiment aligns with a wider move toward user-configurable feeds, with Threads and X also testing controls over recommendation algorithms.