Experience Search is an AI-powered, multimodal search solution that revolutionizes product discovery by understanding what people truly want, not just the keywords they type. By analyzing both text and images, it delivers highly relevant results, making the search experience feel more natural and personal.
Experience Search enables you to create API-based campaigns that help your site visitors find exactly what they're searching for, without many of the pitfalls of traditional site search. Today's shoppers are intent-driven, and have the expectation to be understood.
The Experience Search dashboard
From the dashboard, you can create and manage one Visual Search and one Semantic Search campaign. Each campaign can include multiple experiences and variations, with different targeting and testing configurations.
Semantic Search enables users to search using a text query, while Visual Search enables users to search using an image.
The Experience Search Dashboard provides an overview of your campaigns, including a summary of each campaign's success and performance over time. In addition, this is where you configure how to display search results, edit your campaigns, and view full campaign results.
Before you can get started working with Experience Search, you must complete some implementation steps. See Experience Search Implementation Overview for details.
After you complete the implementation, you're ready to configure your search experience and create campaigns.
Learn more about the Search API in our Developer Docs and API Reference
How Experience Search works
Experience Search includes two campaign types:
- Semantic Search: Supports natural language text queries and evaluates them based on meaning rather than exact keyword matches to better understand user intent.
- Visual Search: Lets shoppers search using an image and returns visually similar items from your product feed.
The Experience Search dual approach ensures shoppers always find what they need. It combines semantic analysis of product text with a visual understanding of product images. This is a game changer because it:
- Bridges gaps in product catalogs where tagging can be inconsistent or incomplete.
- Guarantees results, even for vague or highly specific queries.
- Unlocks revenue opportunities that traditional search misses.
Experience Search provides a suite of features that make it effortless for shoppers to find what they want while giving businesses powerful control, as described in the following sections.
Query guidance
- Autosuggest: As shoppers type, you can provide real-time, relevant, and trending search suggestion to help shoppers more quickly complete or refine their query, while also directing them to desired results.
- Spellchecker: You can enable spell correction so misspelled queries still return relevant results.
For technical details, see Autosuggest and Spellchecker in our Developer Docs.
Result refinement and controls
Merchant controls
- Filtering: Narrow search results using include and exclude rules based on specific criteria, such as categories, price ranges, dates, and other product attributes.
- Merchandising: Influence result ranking using Boost and Bury rules to promote or demote specific products based on business priorities.
- Product listing pages (PLP): Dynamically generate PLPs on your site while leveraging our advanced capabilities to optimize and personalize them.
Shopper controls
- Facets: Provide shoppers with a set of selectable filtering options displayed on the search results page, such as Category, Color, Brand, or Price range.
- Sorting: Let shoppers reorder their search results using a sort control, for example Price: low to high or Price: high to low.
- Pagination: Divide search results into multiple pages so shoppers can navigate large result sets more easily.
For technical details, see Filtering, Facets, Sorting, and Pagination in our Developer Docs.
Analytics, testing, and optimization
Experience Search provides robust analytics and tools to help you measure, test, and refine search performance:
- Overview report: Get a high-level view of search performance and key metrics.
- Query analysis by segment: Understand what your shoppers are searching for and how different segments behave.
- Native A/B testing: Run experiments directly within the Experience OS to optimize search outcomes.
- Playground: Safely preview and test how a query will behave before deploying it live.
Why elevated product discovery matters
Traditional search falls short. It's rigid, and often fails when users don’t type the exact product name or keyword. It also depends heavily on manual configuration, requiring teams to configure rules, build product catalogs, and meticulously tag every item. This process is prone to inconsistencies and human error, and requires constant maintenance.
This reliance on manual work leads to frustration for both customers and internal teams. And it results in lost revenue and missed opportunities, especially on long-tail (uncommon or highly specific) queries.
Experience Search resolves these issues by going beyond simple keyword matching. It introduces a native-AI approach to deliver a smarter, more adaptive discovery solution.
With Experience Search, product discovery becomes a growth driver, enhancing engagement, personalization, and revenue growth. Your shoppers get a seamless, intuitive experience, while your business gains a flexible, powerful tool with a measurable impact.