Your YouTube watch history is under History, at youtube.com/feed/history, and Google’s My Activity lists the same videos with your searches. Both work well for something you watched last week. To search years of history at once, by title, channel, and year, load a Google Takeout export into the tool on this page.

Updated

Where YouTube keeps your history

  • On YouTube: select History in the menu, or go to youtube.com/feed/history. In the YouTube app, it’s under the You tab.
  • In My Activity: open My Activity, select YouTube History, then Manage history. Select the search icon to search it, as YouTube Help describes.
  • In Google Takeout: a copy of everything YouTube still keeps, as files you download. The steps above the tool get just your history, as watch-history.json and search-history.json.

Why some videos are missing

  • History was paused. According to YouTube Help, videos you watch while history is off don’t show up in your history.
  • Auto-delete removed them. With auto-delete on, YouTube removes history older than the period you chose. Google Accounts made since June 2020 auto-delete YouTube history after 36 months by default, 9to5Google reported. Check yours under Manage history → Auto-delete in My Activity.
  • You deleted them. Deleted videos leave your history and later exports.
  • You weren’t signed in. History belongs to the account you were signed in to when you watched.
  • This page leaves them out. It skips YouTube Music plays, auto-generated “Topic” music channels, ads, and community posts. Removed and private videos are left out too, because the export no longer names their channel.

How the search works

  • Words, in any order: type words from a video’s title or channel name. Every word has to match, and capital letters don’t matter.
  • Years and channels: pick a year to narrow the list, or select a channel name in the results to see only that channel’s videos.
  • Rewatched videos: Takeout records each time you opened a video, not how long you watched it. A video you opened twice counts as rewatched, even if you left after a minute.
  • Searches: load search-history.json to see what you typed into YouTube search. Each query is read from its search link, so a JSON export works in any language. HTML exports need English dates.
  • Your files: your browser reads them on this page. They’re never uploaded to Retube’s servers, and the site’s session recordings leave the tool and its results out.

Give your most-watched channels their own feed

Your history shows which channels you keep coming back to. YouTube’s Subscriptions feed still mixes them in with everything else you follow.

Retube, our free Chrome extension, groups the channels you choose into feeds inside YouTube, such as Cooking, Science, or Learning. Under your results, choose Download Retube backup to save your 20 most-watched channels as one feed. Import the file in Retube from Help & support → Backup & local data. Importing replaces any feeds you already have, so it suits a fresh install best.

For a year in review from the same file, try YouTube Wrapped. To sort channels by topic yourself, read how to organize YouTube subscriptions.