SkipSeenHow SkipSeen decides what to skip
Version 1.2.1 · Updated September 29, 2026 · By Keenan Kaufman
Short answer: SkipSeen counts a YouTube video as watched once you've seen 30% of it, or when YouTube's red progress bar shows you have. When autoplay moves on by itself to a watched video, SkipSeen presses Next. It never skips videos you click yourself, playlists you chose, or channels on your never-skip list.
SkipSeen does one thing: when YouTube autoplay moves on to a video you've already watched, it presses Next for you. Everything below explains what “already watched” means and when SkipSeen deliberately stays out of the way.
What counts as “watched”
A video counts as watched once you've seen 30% of it. You can move that anywhere from 10% to 100% in settings. SkipSeen learns about videos in two ways:
- While you watch. It records your progress as you pass 30%, 50%, 75% and the end of a video, and whenever you pause.
- From YouTube's red progress bars. YouTube draws a red bar under the thumbnail of videos you've partly watched. As those thumbnails appear while you browse, SkipSeen reads them and adds any video past your threshold. That's how it picks up videos you watched before you installed it, without you rewatching anything.
It keeps the 5,000 most recently watched videos. Older entries drop off automatically.
When it skips
Every time a new video starts, SkipSeen runs through these checks in order. The first one that sends the video down the “plays” path ends the decision.
- Did the last video finish and autoplay move on by itself?No: it plays
- Is SkipSeen switched on?No: it plays
- Is the video in your watched history?No: it plays
- Is it in a playlist you chose, with playlist skipping off?Yes: it plays
- Is the channel on your never-skip list?Yes: it plays
- Has it already skipped five videos in a row?Yes: it plays
Passed every check: SkipSeen skips it
To skip, it clicks YouTube's own Next button, so autoplay carries on to the following video in Up Next. Every skip is added to the skip log in the popup.
When it deliberately doesn't skip
- You clicked the video yourself. If you chose it, you get it, even if you've seen it before.
- Playlists you picked. A playlist is a queue you built on purpose, so it plays as-is by default. Auto-generated Mixes are still skipped, since they're autoplay by another name. You can turn on skipping inside playlists in settings.
- Never-skip channels. Add a channel from the popup while you're watching it. SkipSeen still records what you watch there, so removing the channel later picks up where it left off.
- Five skips in a row. If autoplay serves up five watched videos back to back, SkipSeen lets the sixth play rather than skipping forever.
Where it works
SkipSeen runs on youtube.com in desktop Chrome and Firefox, and in Chromium browsers such as Edge and Brave that install from the Chrome Web Store. It can't run in the YouTube mobile or TV apps, because those don't support browser extensions.
What it stores, and where
For each watched video: its ID, title, channel, how much of it you watched and when. Plus your settings (including your never-skip channels) and the current session's skip log. All of it is kept in your browser's local extension storage. The extension asks for two permissions (storage, and access to youtube.com), has no servers and no account, and never uploads your history. Full details are in the privacy policy.
Something not skipping?
The support page walks through the usual reasons. It's almost always one of the cases above. For why YouTube repeats videos in the first place, see the guide to why autoplay replays watched videos, and for how SkipSeen differs from hide-watched extensions, see the comparison.