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.

Results are based on the searchable properties of the different result types.

Note

Changing the results limit and searchable properties is an advanced theme customization that can be done with the predictive search API.

Searchable properties

By default, predictive search compares a customer's search term to the following properties.

Result type	Searchable properties
Products	body product type tag title variant barcode variant sku variant title vendor
Pages	author body title
Blog posts	author body tag title

Limitations

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

Predictive search is not available in all languages. See the complete list of supported languages.