Our customers kept searching for products we had in stock and getting zero results or random stuff. Turns out Shopify native search can’t handle synonyms — people search “sneakers” but our catalog says “athletic shoes” so nothing comes up.
Cleaned up our tags, added synonyms in Search & Discovery, helped a little. Eventually switched to an AI search tool and it actually fixed it.
Curious if anyone else went through this — what worked for you?
Well without anything identified as “sneakers” I wouldn’t imagine a search would bring anything up. That’s not frustrating to me, that’s just the need to be thorough. If I sell ice cream and I don’t include the word milk somewhere, I shouldn’t expect ice cream to be a result of a “milk” search.
Of course if an AI app or something already does associate ice cream with milk, that would be a better choice and less work.
Yeah, Shopify’s native search is honestly pretty weak — no fuzzy matching, no synonym handling, so customers misspelling something or using slightly different terms get zero results. Super frustrating when you know the product is right there.
What helped me was going through my top search terms (Analytics > Reports > Top online store searches) and adding common alternate terms into product tags. It’s tedious but it made a noticeable difference. For anything beyond that, you’d want to look into a dedicated search app that handles typo tolerance and synonyms natively.
I think soon Shopify will add Vector Search functionality because it is getting cheaper and easier to implement this.
what’s a good free search app other than the Shopify one?
I only found one other free one - you can probably find it by searching for “free search” in the Shopify App Store. Look for ones that has semantic search or mention AI enabled.
ooh thank you - that helps!
I read “Vector Search” and “Semantic Search” mean the same thing?
yes you are right - good luck!
Smart Product Filter & Search is a good app that you can use. It has a great AI semantic search.
Also, I know the native search is weak. Please research more and write better product titles and descriptions. Do a thorough audit for SEO and check the results.