Understanding age estimation on YouTube

Note: YouTube’s age estimation is not used for accessing advanced features. Learn more about getting access to intermediate and advanced features

Understanding YouTube's age assurance protections

We're committed to bringing the best, most age-appropriate experience and protections to users on YouTube. This starts with users telling us their age when they make an account. To provide a safer and higher-quality experience for our teen users, we also use an age estimation model to determine if a user is over or under the age of 18. We do this regardless of the date of birth on their account in order to put protections in place for more teens on YouTube.

If our age estimation model determines that a user is under 18, standard protections for teen users are automatically applied to their YouTube experience (more info below). This model is currently applied in several countries, including Australia, Brazil, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States and countries in the European Economic Area. We will continue expanding to more countries soon.

Note: If you believe that the age estimation model has incorrectly determined your age, you can always verify your age by submitting your government ID, credit card or selfie through a verification process in your Google Account. Learn more about verifying your age.

Learn about viewer protections

If our age estimation model determines that a user is under 18, these changes will be automatically applied to the user's account:

• Age-restricted content: Users won't be able to watch videos that have been age restricted. Learn more about age-restricted content.
• Digital wellbeing: Break and bedtime reminders will be turned on by default. Learn more about wellbeing features on YouTube.
• Adding safeguards to recommendations: Recommendations will be adjusted to limit content that, while acceptable in isolation, could become problematic for some younger viewers when viewed repeatedly. Learn more about how we build content recommendations to meet the unique needs of teens.
• Safeguards for search results: YouTube has search safety protections for teens to prevent results from appearing for search terms linked to content that is either age-restricted or violative. Learn more about how YouTube provides age-appropriate experiences for teens. Note: Safeguards for search results are also automatically applied for supervised accounts and signed-out users.
• Safety reminders: Users will receive reminders to be thoughtful about their own privacy when commenting publicly.
• Ads: Users will only be served non-personalised ads. Additionally, users will not see ads from sensitive ad categories such as gambling and alcohol. Learn more about ad-serving protections for teens.
• Auto-play: Users will be prompted to toggle auto-play on or off. Learn more about auto-play choices on YouTube.
• Podcasts: Viewers cannot add a podcast through an RSS feed.

Learn about creator protections

If we determine that a creator is under 18, the following changes will be automatically applied to their account in addition to the settings above:

• Uploads set to private: Creators will have all new uploads set to private in Creator Studio. Creators have the ability to review and update these privacy settings at any point.

• Gifts: Creators will not be able to earn from gifts on vertical livestreams, which requires users to be estimated or verified as 18+.
• Safety reminders: Creators will get reminders to be thoughtful about their own privacy when uploading a video or commenting publicly.

Note: Audience reports in Analytics currently only show viewership by the age that a user set during account creation. It does not reflect users determined by our age estimation model as under 18 at this time. We are working to make this change and will share more soon.