Guide

How to Export Your YouTube Watch History

Last updated: July 8, 2026 · ~15 min (mostly waiting)

There are two ways to get your YouTube watch history out of Google: the official route through Google Takeout, and browser extensions that read your history page directly. This guide walks through Takeout step by step, shows exactly what the export contains — and is honest about the one thing it leaves out.

Exporting with Google Takeout, step by step

1. Open Takeout's YouTube page. Use the direct link below and sign in with the Google account you use on YouTube. It opens Takeout with “YouTube and YouTube Music” already selected, which saves you deselecting all 50-odd Google products and then scrolling to the bottom to find YouTube. If you land on the full product list instead, click “Deselect all” at the top and tick “YouTube and YouTube Music” yourself — the rest of this guide is identical. Open Takeout for YouTube →
2. Export only your history. Click "All YouTube data included", press "Deselect all" in the dialog, and tick only "history". Do not skip this. It is the single step that decides whether your export takes two minutes or two days: leave everything selected and Google bundles every video you have ever uploaded, in full.
3. Optional: switch the history format to JSON. Click the "Multiple formats" button and change History from HTML to JSON. This is the step almost everyone misses, and most analysis tools need it — Decode My Feed reads either format, so you can skip it here and lose nothing.
4. Create the export. Click "Next step", keep "Export once" and the .zip file type, then click "Create export".
5. Wait for Google's email. A history-only export is usually ready in a few minutes, but Google says it can take hours or days. You'll get an email with a download link when it's done. Decode My Feed's upload page can save you a calendar reminder to check for it — it's built in your browser and contains nothing but a date and a link.
6. Download the archive. Download the .zip from the link in Google's email. You can upload that .zip to Decode My Feed exactly as it arrived — we open it in your browser and pull out the history file for you. If you'd rather extract it yourself, or you're using another tool, the file is at Takeout → YouTube and YouTube Music → history → watch-history.json.

What’s inside watch-history.json

The JSON file is a flat list with one object per video you watched. For each one, Google includes:

• the video title and its URL;
• the channel name (in a subtitles field);
• the timestamp of when you watched it; and
• occasionally a note that the video came from an ad.

It covers your full YouTube history (and YouTube Music plays, mixed into the same file), going back years — which makes it great as a personal archive.

What Takeout leaves out

The export does not include how long each video is or how much of it you actually watched. Every entry looks the same whether you bailed after four seconds or finished a 40-minute deep-dive. That completion signal — the one the recommendation algorithm itself pays the most attention to — only appears on your YouTube history page as the red progress bar under each thumbnail.

That’s why our free Decode My Feed extension exists: it reads that history page on your own device and picks up each video’s duration, how much you watched, and the completion percentage — the data a Takeout export can’t give you. It then hands the result straight back to the site, so there’s no file to export and re-upload. No waiting for an email, either: it takes about a minute.

Common problems

“My file is HTML, not JSON.” That’s Takeout’s default, and the format choice in step 3 only applies to future exports — so most tools will send you back to re-run the whole thing. You can upload the HTML file (or the .zip holding it) to Decode My Feed as-is: it carries the same titles, channels and timestamps as the JSON version, and we read it in your browser either way.

“My archive only contains archive_browser.html.” That file is just the index page Google puts in every export — if it’s alone, your export came back empty. Three usual causes: your watch history is paused (check My Activity controls — if YouTube History is off, Google has nothing to export), “history” wasn’t ticked in step 2, or you ran Takeout signed in to a different account (or a Brand Account) than the one you watch YouTube with.

“The export is taking forever.” You likely left all YouTube data selected (step 2). Videos you’ve uploaded are included in full, which can add gigabytes. Re-run it with only “history” ticked.

“I use multiple accounts.” Takeout exports one account at a time. Repeat the process signed in to each account whose history you want.

What to do with the file

Plenty of free tools will turn a Takeout export into charts — totals, top channels, watch-time graphs. We wrote an honest comparison of those free tools and where our paid report differs (short version: they describe what you watched; we explain why the algorithm keeps feeding it to you).

You can also upload the Takeout .zip to Decode My Feed directly, exactly as Google sent it — we open it in your browser and find the history file, so there is nothing to extract. (An already-extracted watch-history.json works too.) Fair warning, stated there as well: without watch-progress data the report skips its completion-based sections (viewing style, attention gap, reclaimable time).

If you do buy a Takeout report, your second scan is free. Run the extension whenever you next have a desktop Chromium browser to hand — one click, no file to upload — and we’ll merge it with the timing data from your Takeout run: Takeout is the only source of time-of-day, the extension is the only source of watch progress — and rebuild the full report at no extra charge.

Next: how this compares to the free tools