---
title: What is Recommendation engine?
url: https://markin.ai/glossary/recommendation-engine
category: Decisioning and next best action
---

# Recommendation engine

> A recommendation engine ranks items by predicted affinity for a user, usually inside one surface such as a catalogue, feed or storefront. It optimises relevance within that surface and has no view of margin, contact history or what other teams are doing to the same customer.

## Why it matters for ARPU

Relevance and revenue diverge constantly: the most likely next item is often the cheapest one, or one the customer would have found anyway.

## Related terms

- [Next best action](https://markin.ai/glossary/next-best-action), Next best action is the single intervention that maximises expected value for a specific customer at a specific moment, chosen across every available option including doing nothing.
- [Next best offer](https://markin.ai/glossary/next-best-offer), Next best offer selects the most valuable commercial proposition for a customer: which product, plan, bundle or price to present.
- [Propensity model](https://markin.ai/glossary/propensity-model), A propensity model estimates the probability that a customer takes an action, such as buying, upgrading or cancelling.
- [Decision layer](https://markin.ai/glossary/decision-layer), A decision layer is the system that sits between the data warehouse and the execution tools and decides, per customer, what deserves to happen next.

## Go deeper

- [Recommendation engine vs next best action](https://markin.ai/compare/recommendation-engine-vs-next-best-action), Item ranking vs customer decisioning.
- [Next best action marketing](https://markin.ai/blog/what-is-next-best-action), The pillar guide to per-customer, per-moment decisioning.

Source: https://markin.ai/glossary/recommendation-engine