The Roblox apps and website are designed to showcase unique, innovative creations and help people discover experiences they'll love, every time they visit. Every day, creators share a broad array of experiences — from virtual concerts to social hangouts — and Roblox's dynamic discovery systems deliver that content to our global audience of over 50 million daily users.
Here are the core principles that guide our investments in discovery today:
Value - Discovery distribution is primarily based on the value an experience provides to the Roblox community; we want everyone on Roblox to be able to discover experiences that they enjoy. Value can be demonstrated through engagement, long term retention and monetization.
Personalization - We want every experience, large and small, to have an opportunity to connect with the people that will value it. Personalization ensures that everyone can find unique content that is relevant to their interests.
Safety - Safety and civility are critical to grow a thriving community. We won't recommend and will remove policy-violating experiences.
How Discovery Happens
The role of content discovery is to help people on Roblox find experiences that they value, and to help experiences find a relevant audience. Our vision is to have a personalized discovery system that will distribute content that is most relevant to the audience it is served to. And as noted above, we currently measure value through engagement, long term retention and monetization, as well as safety.
As the community evolves, so do our discovery systems. Below is a brief overview of how different parts of the platform contribute to discovery.
If your experience isn't populating in discovery and search as expected, see Troubleshooting for additional steps and information.
Home Page
The Home page is where a majority of discovery takes place and consists of recommendations which are algorithmically generated to optimize for engagement, long term retention and monetization.
We take many factors and signals into account when generating recommendations for someone, for example:
- What is their demographic (age, gender, location)?
- What device are they using Roblox on?
- What content have they engaged with before and what have they ignored?
- How often do they return to something they have engaged with before?
- How much time or Robux have they invested in the experience?
- How well does the experience retain their audience?
Today, the vast majority of discovery happens on the Home page, this could of course evolve over time.
Search
Search helps people find what they're looking for. Searches could be anything from the title of a specific experience to a broad genre or key term, and several factors will determine the relevancy and ranking of search results.
Your experience name, description, and metadata provide useful information to match it with relevant search queries, but even more important is whether someone interacts with and engages with your experience after they see it in the results.
Note: Search results can vary depending on platform (web or app), the relevance to the search query (often determined through metadata), and the engagement signals (such as long term retention and monetization).
Discover Page
The Discover page is another place where people can find experiences they may enjoy. It organizes popular content on the platform into various sorts and is not personalized (outside of the "Recommended For You" sort). While this page showcases some of the most popular experiences on Roblox, it accounts for a very small portion of experience discovery.
Even though our focus is on a more personalized approach to content discovery, the Discover page is a great spot to see which experiences are popular on Roblox.
Best Practices
Ultimately the best way to grow an audience on the platform is to build and iterate on your experience to drive engagement, long term retention, and monetization.
Additionally, you can help our systems know more about your experience with the following best practices:
- Using a relevant title, description and icon that are true and unique to your experience.
- Using commonly-known genre terms and keywords in your title and description that match your experience with relevant search terms.
- Investing in your Experience Details page with in-experience visuals, videos, and good descriptions that make it easy for new users to know what your experience is about and for existing users to know what's new.
- When possible, utilize Localization tools to optimize your experience's discovery in other languages.
Continue reading about metadata best practices here.
Discovery can also be encouraged by community-building on social media and through the use of other content tools including updates, user advertisements, and sponsored experiences. Marketing an experience, on or off Roblox, drives traffic to build an initial audience which will help inform content discovery and recommendations.
In general, experiences which are built with a specific audience in mind result in higher retention, long term engagement, and monetization.
Troubleshooting
If the experience you published is not populating on discovery pages or search results, it may be due to the following:
- When publishing a new experience, it can take multiple days to appear in content discovery.
- Your experience is not set to public.
- The name or description violates our community standards, such as keyword spam. Ensure that your experience's metadata follows our best practices. When updating your experience's metadata, it may take up to 14 days for your experience to repopulate in discovery pages and search results.
- If your experience has recently been moderated, ensure that you completely revert your title and description to restore visibility on the discovery systems.