# Target users interested in a topic recently, not from a year ago?

Asked by Jamal Carter on 2026-04-15. Tags: cql, audiences, interests.

We tag interests from article reads at our media site, so a politics reader
picks up a politics interest on their profile. Now we're promoting a new
politics vertical with

```cql
user has shown interest in ["politics"]
```

and it matches people whose last politics read was ancient. Someone who binged
election coverage a year ago and reads sports now still gets the promo.

Is there a way to scope interest conditions to recent behavior, or do I need to
rethink how we tag

## 2 answers

### Answer from Kofi Mensah (2026-04-16)

You do not need to rebuild your tagging. `user has shown interest in ["shoes",
"clothes"]` style conditions are the behavioral interest check, and the
segmentation engine supports recency and frequency conditions on top of the
100+ signals it tracks. So "interested in politics AND active recently" is
expressible without leaving the audience editor.

When the requirement is strictly "this session", compose the interest check
with session conditions instead:

```cql
user has shown interest in ["politics"] and session's stats' pageviews > 3
```

or gate on a concrete page visit with a `user has viewed a page with path
"/politics"` style check. Session conditions reset every visit by definition,
which is the tightest recency window you can get.

### Answer from laurenb (2026-04-17)

We hit exactly this at a publisher I worked with. The
[reading history playbook](https://blog.croct.com/post/reading-history-playbook)
on the Croct blog walks through the content-affinity pattern end to end,
including how to keep stale affinities from dominating.

The mental model that helped us: profile interests answer "has this person ever
cared about X", session and page-view conditions answer "do they care right
now". A promo for a new vertical usually wants the intersection of both, not
the profile check alone.