Clear YouTube Search History: Deleting Your Viewing History Too

Clearing your YouTube watch and search history is useful if you share a device, use YouTube on a work computer, or just want your recommendations to reset based on a clean slate.

Steps

1. Go to youtube.com and sign in to your account.
2. Click the three-line menu icon in the top-left corner.
3. Click History in the menu that appears.
4. On the Watch history tab (the default open tab), click Clear all watch history and confirm.
5. Switch to the Search history tab and click Clear all search history to clear that separately.

Both are cleared independently, so you can clear one without the other if you’d rather keep your search history but reset your watch history (or vice versa). If you’d like to stop history being tracked going forward rather than just clearing it retroactively, the same History page has a Pause watch history / Pause search history toggle that stops new entries being recorded until you turn it back on.

Setting Up Auto-Delete Instead of Clearing Manually

If you’d rather not have to remember to clear your history yourself, Google also offers an auto-delete option that removes entries older than a set window on an ongoing basis. From My Activity > YouTube History > Manage history, look for the Auto-delete option and choose a 3-month or 18-month rolling window — anything older than your chosen period gets removed automatically going forward, without needing to manually clear anything again. This applies the same underlying Google Activity controls that manage your wider Google account history, not just YouTube specifically, so if you’ve already set an auto-delete preference elsewhere in your Google account it may already be applying here too. On mobile, the same controls are reachable from the YouTube app: tap your profile picture > Settings > History & privacy, where you’ll find the same manual clear buttons, the pause toggles, and the auto-delete option, all mirroring what’s available on desktop.

Resources

• Yo
• u
• Tube
• guide
• YouTube Video Downloader