In reply to Alec.

We're not talking about the "Featured" tab. We're talking about the "Recommended" tab.

The Featured tab is indeed a fixed set. The Recommended tab is not, it is based on the plugins you have installed on that site as compared across all sites.

For example, let's say you have plugin-a and plugin-b installed. Now, we happen to notice that 48% of sites with plugin-a and plugin-b have plugin-c installed. We also notice that 85% of sites with plugin-b also have plugin-d. So those go on the list. Basically, it's a bunch of math. Statistics. Comparing sets to all the other sets and drawing conclusions about what other items might fit into your set as well.

Now, of course this is imperfect. Lots of sites have Yoast-SEO. So it fits quite a lot of the time, with a very diverse cross-section of other plugins. So really it's all about weighting there to tweak the results. And also consider that you probably have some set of plugins you always use. So, those will be on your site, so you're quite likely to see the same results on any site you make. But somebody else, who has a different set, will see different things.

That's how the Recommended tab works.