YouTube’s own yearly summary is called Recap, though most people search for it as YouTube Wrapped. In 2025 it arrived on December 2 and was deleted when the year ended. The tool on this page builds a similar summary from your watch history on any day of the year.
How to see your official YouTube Wrapped
YouTube launched Recap on December 2, 2025. It reached North America first and the rest of the world that same week, according to the YouTube blog. The steps below are how it worked in 2025. We’ll update them when the 2026 Recap arrives.
- In the YouTube app: open the You tab and tap the Your YouTube Recap is here! banner. Recap also appeared on the Home page.
- On a computer: sign in and go to youtube.com/recap.
- Free or Premium: both could see it. Engadget reported that Recap was open to free and Premium users alike.
A Recap holds up to 12 cards. They cover your top channels, your interests, and how your viewing changed. One card gives you a viewing personality, one of 14 types such as The Curious Mind.
Two limits catch people out. You can’t refresh or edit a Recap, and YouTube deletes every Recap after the year ends. Share or screenshot the cards you want before January. If you delete your Recap from its banner or menu, you can’t view it again.
Why your YouTube Wrapped isn’t showing
YouTube Help lists the reasons an account doesn’t get a Recap:
- Too little watch history. YouTube judges eligibility on history from January through late October. Months when history was paused, or that auto-delete removed, don’t count.
- Not signed in. Recap only appears when you’re signed in to YouTube.
- A Brand account. Delegate users on a Brand account aren’t eligible.
- Age or supervision. Accounts under 13, or under your country’s minimum age, don’t get one. Neither do supervised accounts.
- Country or language. In 2025 Recap covered more than 185 countries in 17 languages.
When Recap isn’t available to you, or the year has ended, load your watch history above instead. The tool works for any account whose export contains videos, on any date. Paused months are missing from your export too, and auto-delete limits how far back it goes.
How this summary counts your year
Google Takeout’s watch history lists each video you opened, its channel, and when you opened it. It doesn’t record how long you watched, so this page counts videos, not hours. A video you open twice counts twice.
- Time zone: hours and days follow your local time, so an evening habit shows up in the evening.
- Left out: 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.
- Renamed channels: a channel that changed its name appears under the name on its latest video.
- Your file: your browser reads it on this page. It’s never uploaded to Retube’s servers, and the site’s session recordings leave the tool and its results out.
Expect different numbers from YouTube’s Recap. YouTube builds Recap from its own data. It counts videos and Shorts you watched signed in on phones, computers, and TVs, plus downloads. This page counts the entries in your file for the year you pick, up to the day you exported it.
What to do with your top channels
The top channels list is the part worth acting on. You keep coming back to these channels. 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 them as a Retube feed to save your top 20 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.
To sort channels by topic yourself, read how to organize YouTube subscriptions.