YouTube announced a broad set of updates at this year’s Made On YouTube event, spanning AI-assisted video editing, personalized viewer feeds, live-streaming features, likeness protection, and expanded brand partnership and shopping tools.

The announcements came in a blog post from CEO Neal Mohan, alongside a companion post from Amjad Hanif, YouTube’s Vice President of Creator Products, and Travis Katz, the platform’s General Manager and Vice President for Shopping. Mohan wrote that the update is meant to support “the entire creative journey,” citing more than 20 million videos uploaded to the platform daily.

Creation and Channel Strategy

YouTube is introducing a conversational editing tool across Shorts and the YouTube Create app that guides creators through edits using suggested or custom prompts, producing a first draft that can be refined through further chat-based instructions or edited manually, including automatic pause-trimming and pacing adjustments.

YouTube Studio is gaining feedback on early drafts, thumbnail generation matching a channel’s existing style, and video A/B testing across up to three different cuts of a video to determine which retains attention best. No rollout timeline was specified.

Discovery and Live Features

Viewers will be able to build Custom Feeds through conversational prompts, such as requests tied to mood, commute length, or genre, with the feeds updating automatically over time. Ask YouTube is expanding into product recommendations and artist or podcast discovery. Shorts can now be organized into seasons and episodes, which YouTube said is meant to make serialized content and microdramas easier to follow.

On live streaming, YouTube is adding Live showdowns, letting creators merge streams for head-to-head competitions, along with real-time auto-dubbing for international audiences and an expansion of “Watch With” to long-form video. The company is also adding members-only spaces and AI-powered comment moderation, which it said learns a creator’s individual moderation preferences over time, without detailing how the system is trained or reviewed.

Likeness Protection

Likeness detection is coming to mobile devices, letting creators enroll, receive match alerts, and act on unauthorized AI-generated content from their phones. YouTube said it will also integrate speaking voice detection with facial detection to improve match accuracy. YouTube did not disclose error rates or provide a specific rollout date for the mobile likeness detection feature.

Brand Partnerships

YouTube is adding “Ask Studio” to YouTube Studio, an AI feature to help creators draft responses to brand briefs, build pitches, and tailor Media Kits, described as coming “soon” without a specific date.

Creator Partnerships, the program rebranded from BrandConnect and expanded at YouTube’s 2026 NewFronts presentation, is now available in 20 countries. YouTube is adding a one-click code for sharing brand partner access to performance data and a “creator partnerships boost” feature letting brand partners fund paid media behind a creator’s content. In June, YouTube published a directory of 17 agencies and platforms with API access to Creator Partnerships data, describing that access as limited to companies with direct YouTube business relationships; neither post specifies whether that partner list has changed.

YouTube is also testing dynamic brand segments insertable into up to 20 long-form videos simultaneously, targeted by region, and said it is investing “hundreds of millions of dollars” in incentives for agency partners on high-impact collaborations, without specifying program size or timeline.

Shopping

YouTube’s Shopping affiliate program has more than 1.3 million participating creators, which the company said reflects 13-fold growth in gross merchandise volume over two years, with shopping tags driving more than twice the clicks of description links. The program will expand to 35 countries by year’s end, with localized cross-border links and new affiliate campaigns offering retailer incentives. Mohan’s post confirmed Amazon tagging is expanding internationally; in August, YouTube added Amazon to its U.S. affiliate program.

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