How to delete your Netflix search history

Perhaps you want to hide your guilty pleasures from friends and family, or maybe you just want to better tune Netflix’s recommendation engine. Worse still, what if some pesky relative of yours accidentally signed into your account and messed up your profile Whatever the case, knowing how to delete or edit your Netflix search history can be useful. The process is quite simple, but you will need access to a desktop browser on Mac or PC.

Here's how you delete your Netflix watch history:

Head to Netflix.com via a desktop browser like Google Chrome. Select your profile when asked. Click on the arrow next to your profile icon. Select ‘Account’. Scroll down and click on ‘Edit Settings’.

Scroll down to and click on ‘Viewing Activity’. You will now be presented with a chronologically sorted list of everything you’ve watched on Netflix. Click on the icon that looks like a stop sign. This is on the right of each entry. Every click will hide that particular movie or episode from your watch history.

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Netflix will inform you that the movie or show is now hidden from your history and that it won’t make any recommendations based on that entry

If you’ve hidden an episode of a TV show, you will be presented with the option to ‘Hide series?’

Clicking on it will hide the entire series from your watch history. If you want to reset your account by deleting all your watch history, you can hit the ‘Hide all’ button at the bottom of the list.

Please note that shows and movies once hidden cannot be recovered. If you’re in the middle of a show and want to eventually get back to it, deleting its entry will wipe all record of you ever watching it, including a record of where you left off.

In case you’d prefer a less drastic approach to pruning your watch history, you can delete individual entries from your ‘Continue Watching’ list. This can be done via the website or the Netflix app.

1. Head to Netflix.com or open the Netflix app

2. Scroll down to ‘Continue Watching’

3. Tap or click on the three vertical dots on the card of the entry you want to remove

4. Select ‘Remove from row’

5. Netflix will ask for a confirmation

6. Hit ‘Remove’ to remove the show or ‘Cancel’ to undo your actions

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This process deletes items from your ‘Continue Watching’ tab but remembers where you left off and keeps a record of the show or shows you removed.

Deleting Netflix history is a straightforward process, but one that should be used with some caution. One of Netflix’s biggest strengths is the power of its recommendation engine, after all, and deleting items from your watch history can dramatically impact the shows that are recommended to you.