How To Use YouTube’s Incognito Mode And Browse Anonymously

Browsing YouTube often means leaving behind a trail of your interests, searches and viewing history. But what if you’d rather keep your watch habits private, avoid personalised recommendations or simply stay anonymous for a while? YouTube’s built-in incognito mode is the answer — and it’s surprisingly easy to use.

How to activate incognito mode on YouTube

Enabling incognito mode on YouTube is a quick process, available directly through the mobile app on both Android and iOS devices. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open the YouTube app on your smartphone.
2. Tap your profile picture in the top right corner.
3. Select the ‘Turn on Incognito’ option.

Once activated, YouTube displays a message confirming that you’re now browsing anonymously. However, it’s important to remember your activity might still be visible to your internet service provider (ISP), employer or school network.

Incognito mode ensures that YouTube doesn’t save your viewing history or search data from that session. As a result, your future recommendations won’t be shaped by what you watched while incognito, helping to keep your preferences truly private.

What to keep in mind while using incognito mode

While this feature protects your anonymity on the platform, there are some trade-offs. If you’re a YouTube Premium subscriber, your subscription benefits – like ad-free viewing and Picture-in-Picture (PiP) mode – are temporarily disabled when you switch to incognito. These perks will return as soon as you turn off incognito mode and sign back into your account.

Other ways to stay private on YouTube

If you’d prefer to keep your viewing history private without losing Premium benefits, you can pause your watch and search history instead:

• Go to Settings > History and Privacy in the YouTube app.
• Enable ‘ Pause watch history ’ and ‘Pause search history’.

Additionally, you can manually clear your watch and search history from time to time by visiting the same menu and selecting ‘Clear watch history’ and ‘Clear search history’.

One downside of clearing or pausing your history is that you won’t be able to revisit videos you watched, and your video suggestions may seem random. But for many users, that’s exactly the point — to browse freely without algorithms tracking every click.