Ranking & Algorithmic Transparency

The feed has three tabs, and they are different on purpose.

Following— posts from people you follow, newest first. No engagement scoring, and nothing “suggested for you” injected into the stream. If you follow ten people, you see what those ten people posted.

Nearby — the same reverse-chronological feed, narrowed to people within a radius you set (1 to 50 miles, 5 by default). It is a filter, not a distance ranking: a post two miles away does not outrank one twenty miles away, it just has to be inside the radius to appear at all. It needs location permission, and it uses your location only for that request.

Makers — posts from accounts we have verified as cheesemakers, affineurs or shops, newest first.

We do not rank the feed by predicted engagement, and there is no infinite personalised algorithmic stream. That is a deliberate product decision, not an oversight.

Search matches on five fields: cheese name, country, region, family and flavour tags. Name counts for the most, then country, then family. Partial words match, and so do near-misses, so a typo usually still finds the cheese.

Results are ordered by text relevance and nothing else. We do not boost a cheese for having better photography, a longer profile, a higher rating, an affiliate link or a business subscription. A sparse entry and a rich one that match your words equally well come back in whatever order the text scoring puts them.

You can override that ordering yourself — sort by rating or alphabetically — and you can narrow by milk, country, protected status and intensity. Those are filters you choose, not weightings we applied.

Atlas browsing is ordered by the filters you set — country, milk, family, texture — and alphabetically within them.

When you ask what to pair with something, results come back in tiers, and the tiers are the ranking:

1. Editorial pairings — researched and written by us, with an explanation of why the pairing works.
2. Community pairings — what Caseo users have rated well together.
3. Drafted pairings — generated by an AI model where the library has no entry.

These tiers are always kept visually separate and are never merged into one list. Within a tier, ordering reflects the strength of the pairing and how complete the entry is.

The reverse direction — “I have Chianti, what cheese?” — works the same way, grouped by how you would serve it rather than by tier alone. Which model does what, and when, is at How Caseo Uses AI.

A cheese’s community average is the mean of all ratings logged by users, including private ones. We do not weight by recency, by follower count, or by anything else. We do not remove low ratings, and we do not remove a rating because a producer asked us to.

We do remove ratings that break the Community Guidelines — fake, paid, or self-dealing ones — and doing so changes the average, which is the point.

The “New on Caseo” rail is newest signup first. That is the whole rule.

The only things we do beyond that are exclusions: we leave out you, anyone you already follow, and anyone who is not actually using the app — which we read as having the app installed or having logged a taste in the last 30 days. There is no affinity model, no friends-of-friends graph, and no scoring of any kind.

That is deliberate. At Caseo’s size a recommendation algorithm would be guesswork dressed up as a system, and we would rather show you a cut you can check than one you have to take on trust. Nobody pays to appear here.

Shops are shown by distance from you, and only verified shops appear. Verification is about whether the shop exists and the details are right — it is not a quality endorsement, and it cannot be bought.

The photo strip on a cheese page is always ordered hero → whole cheese → cheese board → scene. That order is derived from what each image is, not from a hand-assigned position, so photos cannot be quietly promoted. User photos appear on a canonical cheese page only after review.

• Follow and unfollow anyone; the Following feed is entirely yours.
• Turn off location, which turns off Nearby.
• Filter the Atlas however you like.
• Make your own posts public or private.
• Set your language, which changes what content is available to you.

None of this is automated decision-making with legal or similarly significant effects, and Caseo does not do any. See the Privacy Policy.

If we change how any of this works in a way that meaningfully changes what you see, we will update this page.

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