At YouTube, we’re committed to connecting you with content from authoritative news sources to help you stay up to date on the latest events. To keep you up to date, we raise authoritative news sources in our news features, like our Breaking News shelf. Below, you can learn more on how we determine what news sources are authoritative and how we elevate their content through our news features.
If you are looking for info on other ways we elevate authoritative news sources, you can read more here.
Authoritative News Sources
To help identify high-quality, authoritative news sources to showcase in our news features, our systems use various signals that may include quality and coverage of recent and relevant news events. Channels must also follow our YouTube Community Guidelines.
We use machine learning techniques to produce the signals used to identify news sources for our news features. Input from third-party human evaluators train, evaluate, and improve these signals on an ongoing basis.
YouTube News Features
We’ve developed several features to help you connect with the latest news on YouTube. These features use signals from Google News to identify news moments and top stories of the day.
The content in YouTube news features comes from authoritative news sources. The specific videos that surface are algorithmically generated based on several signals, which may include, but are not limited to:
- Local relevance and language
- Relevance to news topic or event
- Freshness of content
- Live streams
- Reporting intent, or videos with journalistic context
- YouTube’s standard recommendation signals
- Association with websites whose content surfaces in Google News
The individual YouTube news features below may not be available in all countries/regions and languages.
Breaking News shelf on the Homepage
When there’s a significant news event, a Breaking News shelf may surface on the YouTube homepage. Examples of significant news events may include large-scale tragedies or momentous political occurrences. The shelf will surface for signed-in users that are 18 years old and older. If you’re not interested in this shelf, you can dismiss the Breaking News shelf on the homepage. The shelf prioritizes reporting videos. Raw footage of a news event, commentary or opinion content, or satire may appear less often on the Breaking News shelf.
Top News shelf in Search
If you search for a specific news story on YouTube, you may notice a Top News shelf in your search results. If it’s one of the top news stories of the day, the Top News shelf will showcase content related to the news story. The Top News shelf will show up regardless of age and can’t be dismissed.
Top News shelf on your homepage
If you often watch or search for news on YouTube, a Top News shelf may show on your homepage. The Top News shelf includes content related to the top news stories of the day. This shelf will show up for signed in users regardless of age.
YouTube.com/news
YouTube.com/news highlights the top news stories and videos of the day. On youtube.com/news, you may also notice some experimental features. These experiments may connect you with content from different news sources across various formats.
Developing News Information panel in Search
When you search for a significant breaking news event, an information panel highlighting developing news stories from various news sources may surface. The information panel will also link to the news website, so you can easily access and read the full article about the event. These news websites must be associated with a YouTube channel that meets the eligibility criteria outlined above.
News Watch page
The News Watch page will bring together news stories from authoritative and diverse sources on YouTube to help viewers deep dive and explore different sides of a news story.
The watch page will feature stories across multiple formats including:
- Latest Updates, with the most recent video coverage of the news story.
- Explanations and Commentary, with additional context on the news topic.
- Live News, with live streams showing what’s happening in the moment.
- Shorts, to quickly catch up on the news story’s latest updates.
You can open the watch page for a specific news story by clicking on a video with the newspaper icon on the YouTube homepage, news destination page, or in search results.
Submitting feedback
If you have any feedback or suggestions for news features on YouTube, you can:
- Submit feedback via More
in the panels, or
- Send us feedback using the Menu from your profile picture.