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YouTube
Updated Sep 28, 2026
YouTube is one checkbox inside Google Takeout, and it is a large one. Watch history, every search you ever typed, your subscriptions, playlists, comments, the videos you liked and the channels you followed all come back in it. It ships bundled with the rest of your Google archive, so expect a big download and a wait measured in days rather than minutes.
What you'll get
Watch HistorySearch HistorySubscriptionsPlaylistsChannel DataComments
Before you start
- Go to takeout.google.com and sign in with the Google account that owns the YouTube channel.
- Hit Deselect all before you touch anything. The default selection is enormous and most of it is not YouTube.
- Tick YouTube and YouTube Music. That one checkbox is the entire export.
- If you have your own channel, also tick My YouTube channel. It is a separate item and it is where your uploads, playlists and subscriber list are.
How to download
- Choose the format. JSON is complete. CSV is easier to read in a spreadsheet but you get fewer files, and the watch history is far less useful in it.
- Set the frequency to Export once. Nobody wants a YouTube watch history emailed to them every two months, whatever they might think while filling this form in.
- Click Create export. The email usually arrives the same day, sometimes the next.
- Download the ZIP. YouTube is one folder inside a much larger archive, so open it in a viewer rather than hunting for it.
Pro tip
Deselect everything else first. Takeout has about eighty categories switched on by default, and the only way to get a YouTube export that actually downloads in a sane amount of time is to turn the rest of them off. A smaller archive you finish beats a large one you cancel at 80 percent.
After the download
- The search history is the file to read. The watch history is enormous and mostly a list of things you scrolled past at 2am, but the searches are a genuine record of what you were trying to find out.
- watch-history.json is one large file, not one per video. jq is the tool for that. Opening it in a text editor is how you end up closing your laptop.
- subscriptions.csv is tiny and worth reading properly. Half of it will be channels you do not remember subscribing to.
- playlists.json holds every playlist you have made and every video in it, including the ones you have since deleted. A few are worth restoring.
- Downloading does not clear anything. If you wanted the history gone rather than kept, deleting it is a separate job in the YouTube history page.