How to See Which YouTube Videos Are From Channels You Already Subscribe To
YouTube's homepage mixes subscriptions with recommendations with no visual distinction. Here's how to tell them apart at a glance.
YouTube’s homepage feed blends videos from channels you subscribe to with videos it’s simply recommending, and visually, there’s no difference between them. Both show up as the same thumbnail-and-title card. The only way to tell them apart today is to already recognize the channel name at a glance — which works for channels you watch constantly, and fails for everything else.
Why this matters more than it sounds
This isn’t just a minor annoyance. It has a real effect on what you actually watch: recommended videos are optimized to be attention-grabbing, while videos from channels you deliberately subscribed to represent content you already decided you wanted. When they’re visually identical, the attention-grabbing recommended video usually wins the click, even when the subscribed video was the one you actually wanted to catch up on.
Separating them visually restores the original point of subscribing to a channel in the first place — actually seeing its new uploads, distinct from everything else being recommended around them.
The three ways to handle it
Once you can tell subscribed videos apart from recommended ones, there isn’t just one useful thing to do with that information — different people want different behavior:
- Highlight — add a colored badge or border to subscribed videos so they stand out, while everything else stays visible and unchanged.
- Dim — keep everything visible, but reduce the visual weight of non-subscribed videos so your eye naturally goes to subscriptions first.
- Hide — remove non-subscribed videos from the feed entirely, effectively turning your homepage into a subscriptions-only feed without leaving the homepage.
Reading your subscriptions without a login flow
Am I Subscribed? adds a clear “Subscribed” badge to videos from channels you follow, directly in your existing feed, and lets you choose which of the three behaviors above (highlight, dim, or hide) fits how you actually want to browse. It reads your subscriptions directly from your existing YouTube session — there’s no separate login, no API key to generate, and no account with the extension itself. All of it runs and stays on your device.
The accent color used for the “Subscribed” badge is customizable, so it doesn’t have to clash with your existing theme or extensions.
A quick way to decide which mode to use
If you still want to discover new channels through recommendations, use highlight so subscribed videos stand out without losing the rest of the feed. If recommendations mostly annoy you, dim is a middle ground. If you’ve decided you only want to watch things from channels you already follow, hide turns your homepage into exactly that, with zero extra clicks.
