YouTube Recap turns your 2025 watch history into a shareable story 📺

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It was the missing piece of the puzzle. After Spotify, Apple Music and even Duolingo, YouTube is launching its own year-end Recap—this time based on everything you’ve actually watched. The idea: turn your late-night tutorial binges, endless Shorts scrolling and deep-dive viewing sessions into a visual story you can scroll through and share.

A video recap, not just a musical one 📺

Unlike YouTube Music’s Recap, this one covers your entire YouTube experience. Long-form videos, Shorts, channels, topics, playlists—the whole package. Your Recap is presented as a set of interactive cards (up to a dozen), formatted like stories, highlighting the biggest moments of your year on the platform.

What your YouTube Recap actually shows you 📊

Inside the recap, you’ll find:

• Your most-watched channels of the year
• The topics YouTube thinks define you—tech, gaming, K-pop, DIY, productivity and more
• A timeline of your viewing habits: your tutorial phases, your entertainment streaks, and the months when Shorts completely took over

© YouTube

© YouTube

© YouTube

YouTube is also adding a playful twist with “watching personalities” (think: explorer, builder, creator…) that sum up your viewing style in a single, shareable badge.

YouTube Recap vs. Spotify Wrapped: same idea, different energy ⚖️

The inspiration is obvious: like Spotify Wrapped, YouTube Recap is built for social sharing. But instead of hours streamed or artists discovered, YouTube focuses on how you use the platform. Which creators you actually support, the rabbit holes you dive into, and how your feed shaped you in 2025. It’s less a sheet of raw stats and more a mirror of your year-long viewing behavior.

How to access your YouTube Recap 🧭

YouTube kept things simple:

• On mobile: open the You tab and tap the Recap banner when it appears.
• On desktop: head to the dedicated page at youtube.com/recap once you’re signed in.

The rollout started in early December across North America and is expanding globally throughout the week.

A flattering mirror… or a brutal one 👀

As with any year-end recap, YouTube Recap may either validate your taste or hit you with an uncomfortable truth. Maybe you spent way more time than you thought watching questionable Shorts, drama channels or productivity videos you never applied. But that’s part of the fun: YouTube finally puts into visuals what you’ve always known deep down—you basically live on the platform.

The new end-of-year attention war 🧨

YouTube isn’t just hopping on a trend. It wants to reclaim some of the December social buzz usually dominated by Spotify Wrapped screenshots. Between YouTube Recap, Spotify Wrapped, Apple Music Replay and the surge of “Year in Review” formats, annual summaries have become a digital ritual of their own. The real question now: will you share your YouTube Recap before or after your Wrapped?

A snapshot of your “real” online self? 🔮

YouTube Recap doesn’t just list what you watched. It sketches a portrait of who you are when you surrender to the feed—curious, nostalgic, productive, procrastinating… or a little bit of everything. As these recaps multiply, they’re becoming digital ID cards we display proudly—or hide, depending on the verdict.

So, is YouTube Recap genuinely useful or just another end-of-year engagement trick? And will you share it as openly as your Spotify Wrapped, or is it a bit too revealing given your YouTube habits? Drop your thoughts in the comments—let’s discuss 👇