YouTube Algorithm 2026 - What Creators Need to Know

this worry that like oh well if my subscribers don't like it then YouTube's going to decide for everyone that it's not a good video. So first, it's not only your subscribers who will see it, and two, the algorithm really wants to um know what's best for each viewer, not just based on an overall aggregate

opinion. The fact that someone else doesn't like something that I like shouldn't prevent me from seeing it. >> Yes. I'm Rene Ritchie, your creator liaison, and I am talking today to Todd Bouprey, who is senior director of growth and discovery at YouTube. Todd, what does your team work on? >> So my team works on a variety of things,

but most of it is about recommending content to viewers, uh whether that be on the homepage, on the watch experience, through notifications, and we're really just trying to get the right content to the right viewer at the right time. >> So I went my scour the internet, uh every nook and cranny, and I was trying

to see the most common questions that creators had about like {quote} the algorithm. And one that comes up a lot is sort of this idea that I as a creator make a video and then I upload it to YouTube and then the recommendation system, the algorithm, pushes that out to varying degrees of success.

Um how does it actually work? >> Yeah, so I hear a lot of of the language that creators use does kind of involve this pushing, the algorithm pushing content to viewers. While we do push notifications to people's devices if they're opted in, most of the recommendations are more pulled for each viewer. And so the way to think about it

is when a viewer opens their app or turns on their TV, um that's when the recommendation system is activated for that viewer. And the decisions that the recommendation system makes are generated at that moment, considering the what we understand about the viewer and what they've watched before, what the current context is. Like, what time of day is it? What Which