YouTube Summary has passed 100,000 summarized videos. Until now, we have let search engines index individual summary pages and included those URLs in our sitemaps.
We're changing that policy. We're asking search engines not to index individual video summaries. The summaries themselves are staying.
If you have a bookmarked summary, a link someone sent you, or a video you want to summarize, this does not take that away. It changes how we want the site to appear in search results, not what you can read.
A useful summary is not automatically a useful search landing page
The product starts with a specific need: you have a YouTube video and want to understand it without watching the whole thing. A summary can be useful for that job without being a page we should ask Google to recommend independently.
Our collection covers whatever people choose to summarize. That means many unrelated subjects, different levels of detail, and older summaries produced with earlier versions of the tool. It is a public collection built through use, not a set of articles we have individually chosen and edited for search.
My concern is that indexing every generated page puts too much emphasis on that collection, rather than on the tool and the pages that explain what it does.
That is one reason for this decision. It is not proof that a large number of summary pages has hurt our rankings. More pages do not automatically mean worse SEO, and removing pages from search does not guarantee better rankings. We do not have a measured improvement to announce.
A copyright notice was another reason
We also received a notification from Google about a copyright complaint concerning one summary page. The complaint was dated November 12, 2026. Google told us it was removing the reported URL from its search results worldwide.
The complaint description said: “The content is not meant for public search indexing and is used without permission.”
That gave us another reason to reconsider indexing summaries by default. Our intention is to help people understand videos, not to take credit for a creator's work or make their original video unnecessary. The people who make those videos deserve credit for their work. Our summary pages link back to the original video so readers can watch it in context.
We take that concern seriously. A summary being useful to a reader does not, by itself, answer every question about permission or rights. Rather than treat every generated summary as a page to promote through search, we are choosing a more limited search presence for the collection.
There is an important limit to this change: deindexing is not a copyright resolution. It does not grant permission, remove content from our servers, or settle the complaint about that particular page. Any content-specific action needs to be considered separately.
We are sharing this as part of the reason for our decision, not presenting the complaint as a court ruling or claiming that the rights questions have been settled.
What stays the same
The summaries remain public. You can still:
- Open an existing summary using its direct link.
- Bookmark it or share it with someone else.
- Find summaries through community history, including its title, channel, and category filters.
- Follow Read next recommendations to other summaries.
- Paste a YouTube link to request a summary.
We recently added community search after a request on Twitter. That is still the right direction for finding things inside the collection. Removing summary pages from external search does not mean removing discovery from the product.
One distinction matters: not indexed does not mean private. Anyone with a working summary link can still open it. This is not a privacy feature or access restriction.
How the change works
The implementation adds a noindex, follow instruction to individual summary pages. Search engines that support it are asked to leave those pages out of their results.
We are also removing summary URLs from our sitemaps. A sitemap should point crawlers toward pages we want indexed, rather than advertise pages we are asking them to exclude.
We are not blocking summary pages in robots.txt. Crawlers need to open a page to read its noindex instruction. Blocking that visit could prevent them from seeing the change.
The homepage, blog, FAQ, and transcript extractor are not part of this removal. This policy targets the individual /summary/ pages.
A tool first, not a search result for every video
I want YouTube Summary to be useful because it helps you understand a video, not because we can turn every request into another page competing for a place in Google.
Keeping summaries available while stepping back from search indexing is a deliberate tradeoff. We may lose visits. But a public collection does not have to be promoted through search to be worth keeping.
You can still summarize a video, share the result, or browse what the community has summarized. That is the part of the product we want to keep building: a useful companion to the original videos, with respect for the people who make them.
