How to hide YouTube recommendations

Why hide recommendations

YouTube's recommendations are good at their job, which is keeping you on YouTube. That's the problem when you came to watch one specific video. The home page offers a grid of suggestions, the column beside the player offers more, and when your video ends the end screen offers several others. Hiding them turns YouTube back into a tool you search and subscribe with, instead of a feed.

The built-in way

There's one setting that changes the home page: watch history. Since 2023, YouTube has shown an empty home feed to signed-in users who have watch history turned off and little past history. The page keeps the search bar and the menu, and the grid of recommended videos isn't there.

To try it, open My Activity for your Google account and turn off YouTube History, or pause watch history from YouTube's own history page.

This has real downsides:

• It only clears the home page. The recommendations next to a video and on the end screen still appear.
• It switches off everything that depends on history, including picking up where you left off in a video.
• It's an all-or-nothing switch for your whole account, on every device.

You can also tell YouTube Not interested or Don't recommend channel on individual videos. That shapes what you're shown. It doesn't hide recommendations.

The manual way

Without changing settings, you can avoid most recommendations by how you use the site:

• Bookmark the Subscriptions page and use it as your start page.
• Open videos from search or from a channel, and close the tab when the video ends.
• Use full screen or theatre mode, which pushes the sidebar out of view.

It works when you're disciplined, which is the opposite of the moment recommendations catch you.

Make it permanent with a tool

The cleaner fix is to remove the recommendations from the page and leave your account alone. A userscript, a small piece of JavaScript that runs on a site you choose, can hide the home page grid, the column of suggestions beside the player and the end screen tiles. Because YouTube swaps content in without full page reloads, the tool needs to keep watching the page and hide new recommendations as they're drawn.

ScriptPanda is a Chrome extension that builds that tool from a plain description. Open its side panel on youtube.com, paste the request at the end of this guide, and it writes and installs the userscript. Your watch history stays on, so resume points and your history page keep working, and recommendations simply aren't shown.

Once built, hiding things doesn't call AI, so the tool runs without using your plan's requests. Building it and asking for changes do.

Common follow-ups:

• Replace the empty home page with your subscriptions feed.
• Keep the next video in a playlist, and hide everything else beside the player.
• Add a button that shows recommendations again until the next reload.

Combine it with other changes

The related guides hide Shorts and the comments section. Many people build all three, and each one can be switched off on its own from the extension.

Limits

The tool changes YouTube in Chrome on your computer. It doesn't affect the YouTube apps on phones and TVs, and it doesn't change what YouTube would recommend, only whether you see it. Content can flash on screen for a moment before the tool hides it. If YouTube changes its page layout and recommendations come back, open ScriptPanda on the page, describe what reappeared, and ask it to fix the tool for the current layout.