The Telegraph is one of the UK’s most established news publishers, reaching millions of readers across its website and mobile app. With a large, fast-moving content catalogue and a highly diverse audience, helping readers find relevant stories quickly and naturally is an ongoing priority.
To further strengthen content discovery and reader engagement, The Telegraph partnered with Recombee to support real-time, personalized recommendations, designed to work alongside strong editorial standards rather than replace them.
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SituationObjectives
SolutionRecombee supports personalized content recommendations across The Telegraph’s digital platforms. Personalization influences which content is shown, in what order, and where, adapting in real time as readers interact with the site or app.
Personalization is applied in a way that complements editorial decisions rather than overriding them.
Article Page Recommendations
Dynamic recommendation boxes surface related, same-category, and top-performing articles, encouraging continued reading beyond the initial visit.
Life Section Personalization
The Life section adapts for each reader through personalized article selection, dynamic topic ordering, and a continuously updating feed.
Editors define curated article pools, while Reecombee personalized:
This ensures personalization operates within clear editorial boundaries.
At the end of articles on both web and mobile, readers see dynamic recommendation boxes featuring:
These placements help readers naturally continue their journey after finishing an article.
In the mobile app, the Life section is fully personalized for each reader.
This includes:
Instead of a fixed layout, the section adapts to what each reader is most likely to engage with.
Editors curate a pool of recommended articles. Recombee then personalizes the order in which those editor-approved articles appear for each reader.
This keeps editorial selection intact while allowing the reading experience to feel personal.
Lifestyle sections such as Film & TV, Cars, and Fashion are ordered differently for each reader.
Both the order of the sections and the content within them are personalized, allowing the most relevant topics to surface first.
Readers also see a continuously updating feed of articles tailored to their interests.
The feed is designed to:
Recombee works closely with The Telegraph’s teams to refine personalization over time. Hands-on support from ML and data science specialists helps test new approaches, adjust recommendation strategies, and continuously improve performance as reader behavior and editorial needs evolve.
Recombee's GenAI analytics pipeline gives The Telegraph's editorial and analytics teams real-time visibility into fast-moving newsroom data, turning raw content signals into clear, actionable intelligence.
Using LLM embeddings and sparse autoencoders, articles are automatically clustered into emerging topic segments and named in plain language, with no need for analysts to interpret raw model outputs. Dashboards refresh every 15 minutes, surfacing which themes are rising, which are lasting, and what is driving high-value engagement.
The result is a shift from article-level metrics to segment-level insight, helping editors make faster decisions on promotion, commissioning, and content focus.
Published and presented at the ACM RecSys Conference (September 2025). Read the paper.
“At The Telegraph, a core part of our AI strategy is sophisticated personalisation. After carefully evaluating the market, we selected Recombee as our content recommendation partner.”
The Telegraph is one of the United Kingdom’s leading news publishers, delivering content across news, politics, business, lifestyle, and culture through its website and mobile app. With millions of readers, personalization plays an important role in shaping modern digital experiences.
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