• by Colin Kirkland , July 29, 2025

To help enforce age-appropriate experiences, on August 13 YouTube will begin rolling out an AI-powered “age estimation model” to determine whether U.S.-based users are under the age of 18 via in-app activity, account longevity, and other signals.  

YouTube says that this new tool will examine accounts regardless of what birthdate users manually entered with the overall goal of extending age-appropriate protections and product experiences to more teens, such as “enabling digital wellbeing tools and only showing non-personalized ads.”

The Google-owned company will also enforce other standard protections. These include showing teens “take a break” notifications and limiting repeated video recommendations regarding sensitive topics, including weight loss, fitness level and physical appearance, which have been linked to eating disorders and negative feelings among younger users. 

In addition, the platform will switch on reminders about privacy when teens upload videos or leave comments. 

Underage creators will also notice standard restrictions, such as video uploads being automatically set to private, and the inability to earn from gifts on vertical livestreams.

“Some creators may experience a shift in their audience categorized as teens (under 18),” YouTube explains. “This may result in a decrease in ad revenue since we only serve non-personalized ads to those viewers.” 

If users believe the company’s age estimation model provided an inaccurate result, they will have the option to verify their age by uploading their government ID, selfie, or a credit card.

“Over the next few weeks, we’ll begin to roll out machine learning to a small set of users in the US to estimate their age, so that teens are treated as teens and adults as adults,” James Beser, YouTube’s director of product management, wrote in a recent post. 

Beser says that YouTube will “closely monitor” the update before rolling it out to other countries.