1. The short answer
OnFire does not personalise what you see. Your main feed, the video feed and Stories all show posts in the order they were published, newest first — the same order for everyone.
We do not build an interest profile of you. What you have liked, watched, searched for, or who you follow does not change the order of anything on OnFire. There is no engagement score, no embedding, no "for you" model. The one exception is that posts you made yourself are left out of your own feed, so you are not shown your own content back.
Two parts of OnFire do sort content by something other than time, and we explain both in full below: stays search, which is genuinely ranked, and listing pages, which put a handful of staff-selected listings first and then order by distance or by date.
Neither of those is personalised either. They respond to what you searched for and where you are, not to who we think you are.
2. Your feeds and Stories
The main feed, the video feed and Stories are all ordered by publication time, newest first. That is the whole mechanism. There is one parameter — when the post was created — and it is the same for every user.
What differs between two users is not the order but the set. Access to content posted inside a community or channel depends on your membership of it. Ordinary feed posts are public. Within whatever you can see, the order is strictly chronological.
Suggestion rails inside the feed — the small horizontal strips of Stories or short videos — are also chronological. They show the most recent items, not items chosen for you.
3. Search
Search matches the words you type against titles, descriptions, names and place names. Matching results are shown newest first. Your search history does not influence future searches, and results are not ordered by anything we know about you.
Shop and product search works the same way: text match, then newest first. On nearby product search you get a sort control, which is described in section 9.
4. Listing pages
Listing pages for events, vehicles, restaurants and shops are ordered like this:
- Where you have shared your location, closer listings come first.
- A small number of listings selected by OnFire staff appear before the rest. These are editorial picks. They cannot be bought — see section 8.
- Everything else is ordered newest first.
To give a sense of scale: as of August 2026, six listings out of roughly 146,000 products carry a staff selection.
5. Stays search — the one ranked surface
Stays search is the only place on OnFire where results are scored and ranked rather than simply sorted. Each matching stay gets a score, and the highest scores appear first. Eight things go into that score. Here they are, in order of how much they matter:
| What it measures | Weight | Why it counts for that much |
|---|---|---|
| How well the stay matches your search words | 34% | The largest single factor. If you searched for a place, we assume you meant it. A match on the city counts for more than a match buried in the description. |
| Whether it is free on your dates | 22% | Second largest, because a stay you cannot book is not a useful result. |
| Guest rating | 16% | What previous guests scored it out of five. |
| Host status | 10% | Whether the host is verified or a superhost. See the note below — this currently has no effect at all. |
| Instant booking | 8% | Whether you can book without waiting for the host to approve. |
| Number of reviews | 6% | Deliberately small, and it levels off — a stay with 400 reviews does not get four times the benefit of one with 100. This stops established listings from crowding out new ones. |
| How recently it was listed | 4% | A small boost for new listings that fades over about six months, so that new hosts are not invisible. |
| Selected by OnFire staff | +5% bonus | A flat bonus added on top for a small number of editorially chosen listings. Not for sale. |
Where two stays score the same, the more recently listed one appears first.
An honest note about host status
The 10% host-status factor is in the ranking formula but contributes nothing today. No host on OnFire currently holds verified or superhost status, so this term scores zero for every listing. We are telling you it is there because it is in the formula and will start to matter once host verification is running. Until then, the other factors effectively divide the remaining weight between them.
Filters — price, dates, guests, amenities — narrow which stays are considered. They do not change how the remaining ones are ranked.
6. Explore and Communities
The Explore page shows three shelves of communities, labelled Trending, Recommended and Premium. None of them is personalised, and we want to be straightforward about what those labels actually mean, because they promise more than they deliver:
- Trending is a small sample of communities ordered by how many members they have. It is not a measure of recent activity or growth.
- Recommended is not recommended to you. It shows recently created communities. Nothing about your account affects it.
- Premium is the communities that OnFire staff have marked as featured.
All three shelves are drawn from the same small sample of communities rather than from the full catalogue, so they are best understood as a starting point for browsing rather than a ranked list of the best communities on OnFire.
7. Where ads appear
Ads are placed at intervals in your feed, with the exact position varying. Which ad you see is chosen at random from the ads currently running — it is not based on anything about you.
Ads are labelled "Sponsored" and show who placed them. Our Advertising Transparency page explains this in full.
8. Can anyone pay to rank higher?
No. Nobody can pay to rank higher anywhere on OnFire.
We are required to tell you whether payment influences the order of what you see, and the answer is that it does not. The only way to appear ahead of the normal order is to be selected by OnFire staff as a featured listing, and that selection cannot be purchased.
This is enforced in our database rather than left to policy: any attempt by a seller to set the featured flag on their own listing is automatically reverted, and only an administrator can set it.
Advertising is separate, always labelled as advertising, and does not change the order of the non-advertising content around it.
9. Your options
Separately from explaining how ordering works — which the rest of this page does — a platform that personalises what you see has to offer you a way to change that, including an option not based on profiling.
OnFire has no personalisation to switch off. The feed you get is already the non-profiling one — it is chronological for everybody. There is no alternative ordering to offer you, because there is no profiled ordering to escape from.
What you can control:
- Filters and sorting on searches. Stays search offers filters. Nearby product search offers a sort control.
- What you follow and join. Communities and channels you belong to determine which posts you are eligible to see.
- Location sharing. Listing pages put nearer results first only if you have shared your location. If you have not, that factor does not apply.
- Hiding an ad. Each ad has a "Hide this ad" control.
10. If this changes
If OnFire starts personalising any feed, ranking by engagement, or building interest profiles, we will update this page before that change reaches users, and we will make an alternative that is not based on profiling available at that point.
This page is dated. If the date at the top is old and the product has visibly changed, tell us at [email protected].