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Blocking and Exclusions

Exclusion rules remove specific products from results entirely, so they never appear for that trigger regardless of relevance or other ranking factors.

Overview​

An exclusion is a merchandising rule that lists the products to remove from a trigger's results. A trigger is a search query, a collection page, or a seed product on a recommendation shelf (similar, complementary, or complete-the-look). Exclusions are configured in the merchandising console, in the same rule set as pins and boost/bury rules for that trigger.

note

A seed product is only used as a trigger when the shelf is requested with exactly one seed. A request carrying several seed products does not resolve any seed's rules, so per-seed exclusions do not apply to it.

Exclusions work by product id. There is no attribute, category, brand, region, segment, or inventory-based exclusion rule; to remove a set of products from a trigger, add each product to the trigger's exclusion list.

Use Cases​

  • Discontinued or recalled items: Keep products that should no longer be sold out of a query's results
  • Policy compliance: Remove products that should not appear for a particular query or collection
  • Quality control: Hide products with poor data (missing images or titles) from a high-traffic query until the data is fixed
  • Recommendation hygiene: Stop a seed product's shelf from recommending items that do not belong there

How Exclusions Are Applied​

  • Exclusions apply per trigger. A product excluded from the "running shoes" query still appears for other queries and on collection pages unless it is excluded there too.
  • Exclusions apply to search, collection, and recommendation contexts. Each context keeps its own rule set, so a product excluded from a search query is not automatically excluded from a recommendation shelf.
  • Exclusions can be scheduled. See Scheduled Rules to make an exclusion active only between a start and an optional end time.
  • Rule changes take a few minutes to reach live traffic after you publish them.

Best Practices​

  1. Use sparingly: Exclusions remove products entirely, so prefer bury rules when a product only needs to rank lower
  2. Prefer scheduling for temporary removals: A scheduled exclusion turns itself off; a manual one has to be remembered
  3. Review regularly: Periodically review excluded products on each trigger to confirm they should remain excluded
  • Boost and Bury - For score adjustments that influence position without removing items
  • Pinning - For forcing products into exact positions
  • Scheduled Rules - For time-bound exclusions