Some techniques described herein relate to generating a hierarchical topic model (HTM), which can be used to generate custom content. In one example, a method includes determining first-level topics in a topic hierarchy related to a corpus of documents. A first-level topic of the first-level topics includes multiple words. The multiple words are grouped into clusters based on word embeddings of the multiple words. The multiple words are then subdivided into second-level topics as subtopics of the first-level topic, such that the number of second-level topics equals the number of clusters. A document of the corpus of documents is assigned to the first-level topic and to a second-level topic of the second-level topics, and an indication is received of access by a user to the document. Custom content is generated for the user based on one or more other documents assigned to the first-level topic and the second-level topic.