Predictive search

Predictive search shows suggested results as you type. It helps your customers refine their search without being redirected to a search results page, and quickly explore your store by seeing top results for suggested search terms, products, collections, and more.

You can customize the behavior of predictive search with the Search & Discovery app from Shopify.

Requirements

For predictive search to appear on your store, it must be a feature of your published theme. Predictive search is available for any Online Store 2.0 theme, and can be added to custom storefronts using the Predictive Search API.

Your store's primary locale determines which predictive search behaviors are supported. Learn more.

Search behaviour

Predictive search can return product, page, blog post, collection, and query results.

Query results are suggested search terms that are based on the words and phrases from your product catalog, as well as from past customer searches. Choosing a query result will return a page of search results for that search term.

By default, predictive search will return query, product, collection, and page results. You can change this setting in the Search & Discovery app.

Determining relevant search results

Predictive search presents shoppers with a limited set of highly relevant results. By default, a maximum of 10 possible results are shown across all the queried result types. Because of this limit, there are typically more results available on the dedicated search results page of your store.

Search results are based on the searchable properties of the different possible result types. By default, the following properties are searched:

  • Products: title, product type, variant title, and vendor
  • Pages, collections, and blog articles: title

Searchable translations

Your store's content can be translated with apps like Shopify's Translate & Adapt app. By default, predictive search will compare search terms to the translated content of the following searchable properties:

  • Products: title, product type, variant title, and vendor
  • Pages and blog articles: title

For more information on translations and searchable properties, see the developer documention on the Predictive Search API.

Limitations

Collection suggestions are based on the store's primary language. A customer's search won't be compared to a collection's translated content.

Query suggestions are available in English only, and require both the store's primary language and the customer's online store session to be in English.

Predictive search isn't available in all languages. See the complete list of supported languages.

Ready to start selling with Shopify?Try it free