YouTube’s latest effort to tame its own scale began in May, when it introduced a feature allowing people to generate a video feed from prompts describing their interests, moods or favourite subjects. The company is now widening that experiment: users will be able to create and save multiple personalised feeds on their home screens, with US availability on web, mobile and TV promised “soon.”¹

The expansion was announced Wednesday as Custom Feeds, a prompt-based tool powered by Google’s Gemini model. Rather than accept one broad stream of recommendations, viewers can describe exactly what they want — including what to prioritise or leave out — and receive a dedicated tab at the top of the YouTube homepage. Suggested uses range from podcasts for a 30-minute train journey to “relaxing commentary videos to unwind with.”²

For YouTube, the pitch is discovery, not a revolt against the algorithm. Emily Moxley, the company’s VP of Product Management for Viewer AI, pointed to the sheer volume confronting users: “There’s over 20 billion videos in the YouTube corpus, so you’re always one search away from a treasure trove of topics.”² Custom feeds are meant to make those searches more purposeful, allowing viewers to switch among contexts instead of retraining a single catch-all recommendation stream.

That places YouTube alongside Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, X and Spotify, all of which have experimented with giving users more influence over how feeds are assembled. But YouTube is drawing a firm boundary: its main recommendation feed will not be replaced. The new tabs are an optional shortcut into narrower, user-defined viewing modes.

Support for creating multiple feeds is due to begin rolling out on web and mobile next month, according to YouTube.² The result is more choice at the margins — not full control of the machine running the homepage.