Cross-Site Recommendations on Homepage

Introduction

Cross-Site Recommendations allow news platforms that operate multiple sites to suggest personalized content from across their network — directly on the homepage. This helps users discover high-quality articles from sister sites while keeping the recommendations aligned with their interests.

Scenario Setup

In the Recombee Admin UI, navigate to the Scenarios section and choose Create Scenario.

Enter a Scenario ID, such as "cross-site-homepage".
Choose Recommendation type - Items to User.

Logic

The Logic defines the behavior of the recommendation engine.

Select the news:personal logic type from the News models to deliver personalized recommendations based on each user's behavior and preferences.

Filters

Excluding Articles from the Current Site

Since all articles from all sites are stored in a single Recombee database, use the item property that indicates the source site (e.g., siteId) to exclude content from the current site.

To allow deploying this Scenario accross various webistes, this filter should be sent dynamically in the filter parameter of the recommendation API request, using the current site’s identifier.

Example Filter

ReQL

'siteId' != "<current site id>"

Constraints

Ensure Diversity Across Sites

To showcase the breadth of your network and avoid over-representing any single site, you can apply a Constraint to limit the number of recommended articles per site. To set this up:

Navigate to the Constraints tab and click Add Constraint.
Select or create an Segmentation that groups articles by site (e.g., using a siteId property).
Define the Limit Type:
- Absolute to allow a maximum number of articles from a single site (e.g., up to 2).
- Percentage to ensure no more than a defined share of items come from one site (e.g., max 50%).

This setup ensures that the recommendations include content from a variety of sources, reinforcing the value of your full portfolio.

Requesting Recommendations

There are three ways to integrate Cross-Site Recommendations.

No-Code Widget – create a No-Code Widget using the visual editor in the Admin UI to embed the cross-site recommendations box without coding.
Widget SDKs – use the SDK for a Carousel, Grid, or Feed to display the recommendations in the design of your choice. Use the Recommend Items to User when initializing the widget.
API SDK – call the Recommend Items to User endpoint directly using the SDK of your choice to fetch personalized cross-site recommendations.

Multiple Recommendation Boxes on the Homepage

If your homepage includes multiple recommendation sections — such as personalized category-based sections or top stories — you typically want to avoid duplication of content among the boxes. To achieve this:

Use a single Batch request to send all recommendation requests at once.
Enable the distinctRecomms parameter in the batch request to prevent overlapping articles between sections.

The Widget SDKs handle this functionality automatically.