Open your channel in Telegram, tap the puzzle-piece icon next to the name, and you either get a list of a dozen channels or nothing at all. Most admins don't know the button exists. The ones who do usually can't tell why their neighbor's channel has a full list and theirs shows a blank screen.
Where the list actually comes from
Telegram builds the similar-channels list from subscriber overlap: if a meaningful share of your audience also reads channel X, Telegram treats X as a neighbor and recommends it to you — and recommends you to X's readers in return. Telegram doesn't publish the exact algorithm, but overlap volume and topic closeness are clearly part of it.
The list isn't static. It shifts as your audience shifts — new subscribers from a different niche gradually pull the recommendations toward their own reading habits.
Why the list is empty for a lot of channels
The most common reason: no public @username. Without a link people can find and join directly, Telegram has nothing to recommend the channel against — and nothing to recommend to it either.
Second most common: the channel is simply too new or too small. Until the audience is large enough to produce a stable overlap with other channels, the algorithm has nothing to compare against. Telegram doesn't publish an exact subscriber threshold, but the pattern holds — channels with a solid few thousand subscribers almost always have a list.
Why it's worth checking at all
It's free reconnaissance. The list shows exactly who Telegram considers your closest neighbor by niche — which makes it a ready-made shortlist for cross-promotion. Pitching a swap to a channel that already showed up in your own recommendations lands better than cold-messaging a random account in your topic.
There's a flip side too. If channels that look obviously inflated or low-quality start appearing next to yours, that's a signal your own audience pattern has started to resemble theirs — not a disaster on its own, but a reason to check how clean your subscriber base actually is.
The similar-channels list is the one place in Telegram where the algorithm tells you, unprompted, who you're being compared to. Most admins never see it, simply because they don't know where to look.
How TGuard pulls this list for you
The standard Bot API has no access to this data — recommendations aren't exposed to bots at all. TGuard connects through a separate companion account (logged in as a regular Telegram user, not through the bot) and requests the exact same recommendation list you'd see by opening the app yourself.
The result lands directly in the bot menu — channel names with subscriber counts, no need to open the client and dig for the icon on your own channel page.
There's also a version with a cleanness check
"Recommendations" is Telegram's own data, just surfaced more conveniently. TGuard also has a separate, self-contained tool built around the same idea but a different job: Promotion → "Find clean channels." It doesn't ask Telegram for a list — it matches against TGuard's own network, which by now covers over 10,000 channels whose audiences the bot monitors continuously.
Matching runs in steps: first by the channel's AI-classified topic, then by keyword overlap, then by topic-pair matching — the funnel converges on the 7 to 15 closest matches. For any matched channel that's also been scanned by TGuard, the same cleanness score used in the Cleanness Report gets attached — the list shows something like "Verified cleanness: 87%" right next to each entry. One honest caveat: the score only shows up for channels TGuard has already scanned, not for every channel on Telegram.
The two tools answer different questions. "Recommendations" tells you who your closest neighbor by niche is. "Find clean channels" tells you where you could actually spend an ad budget without paying to reach bots.
How to check it
- Open @channel_guardian_bot and select your channel.
- For Telegram's own list — open "Recommendations" in the channel menu.
- For the cleanness-checked version — open Promotion → "Find clean channels" (needs 100+ subscribers on your own channel).
- Empty list? Check that the channel has a public @username first — without one, it won't appear either in the app or in TGuard.
Similar channels aren't a decorative feature — they're the one spot where Telegram's own algorithm shows you who you're being measured against. Skipping it means giving up a ready-made list for cross-promotion, and for finding ad placements that don't waste budget on bots, that you'd otherwise have to build by hand.
Frequently Asked Questions
A list Telegram automatically builds on a channel's page, based on subscriber overlap and topic closeness with other channels. Telegram doesn't publish the exact algorithm, but the list is generated without any action from the channel owner.
Most often because the channel has no public @username — private channels without a joinable link never get recommendations at all. The list is also commonly empty for very new or very small channels; Telegram doesn't publish an exact threshold, but the pattern is consistent.
TGuard requests the same recommendation list Telegram shows inside the app and displays it directly in the bot menu, with subscriber counts for each channel — no need to open the client and hunt for the icon.
The similar-channels list comes straight from Telegram. "Find clean channels" (under Promotion) is a separate TGuard tool: it matches channels from TGuard's own network of 10,000+ protected channels and shows an audience-cleanness score for each match that's also been scanned by TGuard. It's built specifically for finding where to safely buy ads.