Control the candidate pool
Recommendation Exclusions let you remove individual products, categories, and tags from smart recommendation candidates across the catalogue.
What you can exclude
Individual productsKeep a particular product out of all smart candidate results.
Product categoriesPrevent products in a category from being returned.
Product tagsPrevent products with a tag from being returned.
Matching contextUse an optional category or tag matching rule to limit candidates to the relevant context.
How exclusions fit into selection
The plugin ranks shared-order candidates, applies availability checks, then applies your exclusion and matching rules before returning the final recommendation IDs to WooCommerce.
- Find and rank potential candidates from qualifying order history.
- Remove unavailable and otherwise ineligible candidates.
- Apply product, category, tag, and matching rules.
- Use the configured fallback if the result is still limited.
After changing exclusions
Clear saved recommendation results from Cache & Refresh when you need the new exclusion rules to be reflected immediately in a fresh calculation.
Next steps
Use the adjacent guides to complete the rest of your recommendation controls.
