YouTube used its Made on YouTube event on September 23, 2026 to preview two changes to the way viewers find videos: homepage tabs generated from typed prompts, and an Ask YouTube assistant that compares products, reads comment sections and searches the images inside a video. A demonstration published two days later on the Creator Insider channel ended with a tap through to a merchant's website and an item sitting in a cart.

In Short

YouTube showed two new tools: homepage tabs you create by typing what you feel like watching, and an upgraded Ask YouTube that helps you research a product and then buy it. It matters because creator reviews, viewer comments and even the pictures inside videos become raw material for AI-written answers that finish with a link to a store. For brands, creators and media buyers, more of the path from curiosity to purchase may soon happen inside YouTube's own summaries rather than on a page of search results.

A six-minute pitch

The demonstration runs just under six minutes. Titled "Build Your Own YouTube Home Page! - Made On YouTube", it was posted on September 25, 2026 jointly by Creator Insider, YouTube's channel for creator-facing product news with 919,000 subscribers, and the YouTube Creators channel. The presenter is creator Mina Le. The video description identifies her only by her handle, @gremlita, while YouTube's automatically generated summary of the video uses her name. When a copy of the page was saved on September 27, the video had 6,451 views and 40 comments.

Made on YouTube covered a long list of changes, among them A/B tests of up to three different cuts of a video and real-time auto-dubbing, according to YouTube. The Creator Insider video concentrates on the two with the most direct bearing on discovery. It is also a video that needs careful reading: the transcript attached to it is machine-generated and imperfect. It renders "digicams" as "digams", turns "context" into "contact" in one passage, and the chapter title for the first demonstration spells stationery as "stationary". Quotations in this article are taken from that transcript only where the wording is unambiguous.

Custom feeds: several tabs instead of one

The first half of the video deals with custom feeds. "Custom feeds allows you to create dedicated tabs for any interest, routine, or mood," Le says. "Just prompt a new feed into existence, and it appears right there on your homepage, constantly updating with hyper relevant creators and content."

Two examples are shown. One, built around stationery, gathers creators discussing bullet journals, pencil cases and fountain pens. The other, which Le calls her "late night coziness feed", mixes ambient vinyl records, rain soundscapes and ASMR clips for the end of the day. Creating a feed takes a tap on "add custom feed" and a typed request; the example given on stage was "inspire me with ideas around fashion and pop culture." YouTube then builds a tab on the homepage with, in Le's words, "personalized results based on what I normally like."

That last phrase is important. The feeds are not topic filters applied evenly to the whole catalogue. They sit on top of the viewer's existing profile, which suggests the same prompt typed by two different people would not necessarily return the same videos. The pitch also stresses permanence. "This isn't just a one-time search," Le says. The feed is instead "a dedicated home that keeps updating every time I return."

The concept is not new. YouTube began testing a feature called "Your custom feed" in May 2026, restricted to signed-in US users with English as their device language and both watch history and search history switched on. Each account could hold a single custom feed, and prompts expired after 30 days without use. What YouTube presented on September 23 drops the single-feed limit: a written post on the viewer updates by Johanna Voolich, vice president of product management for viewer products, describes creating and saving multiple feeds. Neither the post nor the video says whether the 30-day expiry, the history requirements or the English-only condition carry over from the experiment.

The two sources also disagree on devices. In the video, Le says the feature is "landing on desktop and mobile soon in the US." The written post, according to YouTube, lists web, mobile and TVs. No explanation is offered for the difference. In his own overview of the event, chief executive Neal Mohan gave sample prompts such as witty podcasts for a daily 30-minute commute and long documentaries to wind down in the evening, according to YouTube.

Why the homepage is contested ground

For creators, the homepage has been a source of friction for much of the past year. Data from retention specialist Mario Joos showed that long-form recommendations on the home feed fell from roughly six per row to two during 2025, with more than 80% of recommendation slots redirected towards Shorts. In March 2026, after sustained criticism over algorithmic opacity, YouTube published guidance on the controls viewers already had: marking videos "Not interested", selecting "Don't recommend channel", and pausing or editing watch history.

Every one of those controls is subtractive. A viewer prunes the feed after something unwanted appears. Custom feeds work the other way round, letting the viewer state a direction in plain language before the recommendations arrive.

YouTube's own account of its recommendation system points the same way. Todd Beaupré, senior director of growth and discovery, told Creator Insider that recommendations are pulled for each viewer and computed session by session, and that the subscriptions feed is small compared with the suggested list on the watch page. A prompt-based tab adds another pull signal, one the viewer writes explicitly. The retirement of the Trending page is a further marker: YouTube argued in 2025 that a single list could no longer capture trends scattered across fan communities, and replaced Trending with category charts. Custom feeds push that fragmentation to its end point - one homepage, split into as many tabs as a viewer cares to write.

What do creators get out of it? The practical questions are about attribution. One commenter beneath the video asked: "How does YouTube know which videos are curated to which feed? Is it based on the hashtags in the video? The video description?" Neither the video nor YouTube's post answers. During the May experiment, YouTube said views from a custom feed counted towards monetization in the same way as views from the standard Home feed. It has not said whether YouTube Analytics will report custom feeds as a separate traffic source, which would let creators see which prompts surface their work. Advertisers face a parallel gap, since nothing in the published material says whether in-feed ad placements will run inside custom tabs.

Ask YouTube becomes a buying guide

The second half of the video returns to Ask YouTube, which has had a short, staged life. YouTube first presented it at Google I/O on May 19, 2026, when it was open to US Premium members aged 18 and over through youtube.com/new, according to YouTube. By July 6, it had reached signed-in desktop users in the US aged 13 and older, for English-language searches only. It sits alongside an older conversational tool for questions about a single video, which YouTube listed among its AI features for US Premium members in December 2024 and brought to smart TVs and consoles without a Premium requirement in May 2026.

Le sets out the scope of the next version in a single sentence. "Ask YouTube was announced in the spring, but new features are being developed to make it even more helpful, supporting more complex conversational search, offering product data in results, holding context when you click into a video, even being able to search the comments or what's visually happening in a video."

The camera test

The demonstration uses a camera purchase. The opening request reads: "I need a new camera that I can easily take around the city when I'm out with friends." Le then asks which style to consider. Ask YouTube returns creator recommendations grouped into categories, ultra-compact point-and-shoots and retro digital cameras among them, and points to "the exact moments where creators test them in real life."

A follow-up narrows the field: "can we go deeper into the retro cameras? I want something like that on the cheaper side with built-in flash that makes everyone look great." The answer shifts to pocketable cameras with flattering flash and adds "a table of specs to help me compare products." YouTube's written post describes the same element as a comparison table of product attributes and categories built around the viewer's stated preferences.

From that table, Le picks a Kodak model, "a modern option that still looks vintage within my price range", and opens a review video. Here the context capability comes into play, as the conversation follows her onto the watch page. According to Le, Ask YouTube "pulled out the best camera from all four being reviewed purely based on my search." How it ranked the four cameras is not explained.

Reading frames and comments

Two further capabilities rely on material that was previously hard to search. Le asks: "does she show photos taken with the Kodak?" The assistant, in her words, "spots the Kodak sample shots in the video and gives me timestamps to jump straight to where she shares those photos." The detection is attributed to "its new visual understanding capacity", meaning analysis of what appears on screen rather than only of what is said. For product reviews, where the evidence is often a photograph or a close-up, that distinction carries weight.

Then comes the comment section. "What do the comments say about battery life?" Le asks, before explaining that "Ask YouTube can now comb through the comments and sum up what viewers are saying." The summary she reads out is brief: "An hour of non-stop use."

That answer deserves scrutiny. Comment sections are unverified. They hold owners' experiences alongside jokes, spam and claims nobody checks, and a synthesis placed next to a specification table gives anecdote the visual weight of data. The video offers no detail on how comments are weighted, whether conflicting claims are flagged, or how the system treats comments a creator has held for review. YouTube already applies related technology on the creator side: in June it added AI comment search to YouTube Studio, a semantic filter that finds published comments by meaning through queries of up to 100 characters. The viewer-facing version turns the same kind of analysis into purchase guidance.

The click-through

The demonstration closes the commercial loop. "All there's left to do is tap on the product card, head over to the site, and add it to my cart," Le says.

What the video leaves out is as notable as what it shows. It does not say where the product data and specifications come from, whether listings in the comparison table can be sponsored, whether a commission is paid when a purchase begins inside Ask YouTube, or which merchant receives the click when several sell the same item. Nothing in the video indicates a commercial arrangement with Kodak. One viewer nonetheless asked in the comments: "Are you serious? What kind of advert is this, Kodak?"

Where this sits in Google's commerce push

Google's search business offers a template for how conversational answers reshape product visibility. A Productrise study of more than 100,000 identical shopping queries found that Google's AI Mode displayed roughly 95% fewer product listings than standard search, and only 0.8% of products visible in standard results also appeared in the conversational version for the same query. Google has since tested new shopping ad placements inside AI Mode answers, including a carousel set between the generated text and the clarifying questions; by August 17, 2026, nearly 30% of ad-eligible AI Mode queries already carried ads. At Google Marketing Live on May 20, the company presented AI-powered shopping ads with Gemini-written summaries.

Ask YouTube's comparison table performs a similar compression. A long page of review videos becomes a short list of models, and a creator's detailed review becomes a timestamp and a sentence. The question for brands shifts from ranking among many results to appearing in the table at all.

Creator reviews are the raw material. YouTube's Culture & Trends team counted 650 million views for review-format videos and 1 billion for haul videos in 2025. Those are precisely the videos an assistant like this mines for its comparisons.

The same event carried a shopping announcement that may connect to this flow. YouTube said its Shopping affiliateprogram would run in 35 countries by the end of 2026, that Amazon support would expand internationally, and that product tagging now automatically surfaces localized offers based on where viewers are watching, according to YouTube. If Ask YouTube's product listings draw on those tags, a creator's review could become the entry point for a purchase the creator is paid for. YouTube has not said that they do.

Availability and what remains undisclosed

Custom feeds are due in the US "soon", with the video and the written post disagreeing on whether TVs are included at the start. For the Ask YouTube additions, Le closes with a similarly open timeline: "Everything you've seen here will be available very soon." No date is given. YouTube's post refers to follow-up questions asked on the go or by voice while watching on TV, which would take the shopping flow well beyond the desktop-only footprint of July.

Outside the US, some viewers were less enthusiastic. "Thank you, even though I won't experience it yet in France," one commenter wrote. No timeline for other markets or languages appears in either source.

Several matters remain undisclosed across both sources:

  • whether ads will appear inside custom feed tabs or within Ask YouTube answers;
  • which data supplies the product attributes in the comparison table, and how models are ranked;
  • whether creators will see custom feeds or Ask YouTube as distinct sources in their analytics;
  • how timestamp jumps affect watch time, even though YouTube said in July that views arriving through Ask YouTube count like normal views.

For now, both features exist as a six-minute demonstration and two written posts. The questions that matter most to advertisers and creators are the ones the demonstration did not stop to answer.

Timeline

Summary

Who: YouTube, presented by creator Mina Le (@gremlita) in a video posted by Creator Insider and YouTube Creators, with written posts from chief executive Neal Mohan and Johanna Voolich, vice president of product management for viewer products. The changes affect US viewers, creators whose reviews feed the answers, and brands and merchants whose products appear in them.

What: Custom feeds let viewers create and save multiple homepage tabs from typed prompts, extending a May 2026 experiment that allowed only one. Ask YouTube is gaining conversational product research: categorised creator recommendations, a specification comparison table, context that carries onto the watch page, visual search that returns timestamps for moments inside a video, comment summaries, and a tappable product listing that leads to a merchant's site.

When: Unveiled at Made on YouTube on September 23, 2026 and demonstrated in a video published September 25, 2026. Both features are described as arriving "soon" or "very soon", with no specific dates.

Where: The United States. The video lists desktop and mobile for custom feeds, while YouTube's written post adds TVs; the post also refers to voice queries on TV for Ask YouTube.

Why: The features shift more discovery and product research into YouTube's own interface, turning creator reviews, frames and comments into structured answers. For marketers, visibility in a short comparison table and the undisclosed rules for ranking, data sourcing and advertising become the central questions.