The ability to control nanoscale features precisely is increasingly being exploited to develop and improve monofunctional catalysts(1-4). Striking effects might also be expected in the case of bifunctional catalysts, which are important in the hydrocracking of fossil and renewable hydrocarbon sources to provide high-quality diesel fuel(5-7). Such bifunctional hydrocracking catalysts contain metal sites and acid sites, and for more than 50 years the so-called intimacy criterion(8) has dictated the maximum distance between the two types of site, beyond which catalytic activity decreases. A lack of synthesis and material-characterization methods with nanometre precision has long prevented in-depth exploration of the intimacy criterion, which has often been interpreted simply as 'the closer the better' for positioning metal and acid sites(8-11). Here we show for a bifunctional catalyst-comprising an intimate mixture of zeolite Y and alumina binder, and with platinum metal controllably deposited on either the zeolite or the binder-that closest proximity between metal and zeolite acid sites can be detrimental. Specifically, the selectivity when cracking large hydrocarbon feedstock molecules for high-quality diesel production is optimized with the catalyst that contains platinum on the binder, that is, with a nanoscale rather than closest intimacy of the metal and acid sites. Thus, cracking of the large and complex hydrocarbon molecules that are typically derived from alternative sources, such as gas-to-liquid technology, vegetable oil or algal oil(6,7), should benefit especially from bifunctional catalysts that avoid locating platinum on the zeolite (the traditionally assumed optimal location). More generally, we anticipate that the ability demonstrated here to spatially organize different active sites at the nanoscale will benefit the further development and optimization of the emerging generation of multifunctional catalysts(12-15).