YouTube Adds AI Editing, Custom Feeds and Shopping to 35 Countries at Made On YouTube

YouTube used its Made On YouTube 2026 event to roll out a wide slate of creator and shopping tools, spanning conversational AI editing, Custom Feeds, live features, likeness protection and an expanded affiliate footprint, NetInfluencer reported on September 25.

CEO Neal Mohan’s accompanying blog post framed the update as support for “the entire creative journey,” citing more than 20 million videos uploaded daily. A companion post from Amjad Hanif, YouTube’s vice president of creator products, and Travis Katz, general manager and vice president for shopping, detailed the product wave.

Creators will get a conversational editing tool across Shorts and the YouTube Create app that suggests or accepts custom prompts, drafts a cut, then lets talent refine it by chat or by hand — including automatic pause-trimming and pacing. YouTube Studio is also adding early-draft feedback, channel-style thumbnail generation, and A/B testing across up to three cuts of the same video; no firm rollout date was attached, NetInfluencer said.

On the viewer side, Custom Feeds let people build personalized queues with conversational prompts tied to mood, commute length or genre, with feeds updating over time. Shorts can now be organized into seasons and episodes for serialized and microdrama formats. Live showdowns will merge streams for head-to-head competitions, alongside real-time auto-dubbing for international audiences.

Likeness detection is coming to mobile, so creators can enroll, receive match alerts and act on unauthorized AI-generated content from their phones, with speaking-voice detection set to pair with facial matching. YouTube did not publish error rates or a firm mobile launch date.

For readers tracking creator platforms on Influencers, Creator Partnerships — the BrandConnect rebrand highlighted at YouTube’s 2026 NewFronts — is now live in 20 countries, with one-click partner access to performance data and a “creator partnerships boost” that lets brands fund paid media behind creator posts.

Shopping remains a centerpiece: more than 1.3 million creators are in the affiliate program, which YouTube 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 expands to 35 countries by year-end, and Mohan confirmed Amazon tagging is expanding internationally after Amazon joined the U.S. affiliate program in August.

Ask Studio, an AI assistant for drafting brand-brief replies, pitches and Media Kits, was described as coming “soon.” Together with dynamic brand segments insertable into up to 20 long-form videos at once and “hundreds of millions of dollars” in agency incentives, the Made On YouTube wave positions editing, discovery, partnerships and shopping as one connected creator stack rather than separate feature drops.