Searching your store

Featured links

1. Shopify documentation on storefront search
2. Shopify documentation on predictive search
3. Shopify documentation on Search & Discovery
4. Shopify pricing plans
5. Shopify documentation on compatible themes
6. Shopify developer documentation on the Predictive Search API
7. Shopify Search & Discovery app
8. Shopify developer documentation on supported predictive-search languages
9. Shopify documentation on Translate & Adapt requirements
10. Shopify developer documentation on Predictive Search API searchable properties

Storefront search in your Align theme helps customers find products, blog posts, and pages across your Shopify store. Shopify manages the search behavior described here, while Align presents search and predictive-search results to your customers.

Predictive search

Predictive search displays suggested results without sending customers to a full search results page. Customers can quickly explore suggested search terms, products, collections, pages, and more as they type.

Customize predictive-search behavior with Shopify’s Search & Discovery app

Availability and compatibility

1. Plan requirements: Predictive search is available with Shopify, Advanced, and Plus pricing plans
2. Theme support: Predictive search must be included in your published theme. It is available in compatible themes and can also be added to custom storefronts with the Predictive Search API
3. Result limits: By default, predictive search shows up to 10 highly relevant results across all queried result types. Customers may find additional results on the dedicated search results page

Tip

Use predictive search to help customers narrow a query quickly. Keep your full search results page easy to use, because it can show more results.

Results and language support

Predictive search can return products, pages, blog posts, collections, and query suggestions. Query suggestions are search terms drawn from your product catalog and past customer searches; selecting one opens results for that term.

By default, predictive search returns query, product, collection, and page results. Use the free first-party Shopify Search & Discovery app to choose which result types appear.

Your store’s primary locale affects predictive-search behavior:

1. Collection suggestions: These use the store’s primary language and do not compare a customer’s query with translated collection content.
2. Query suggestions: These are available only when both the primary language and the customer’s online-store session are English.
3. Language availability: Predictive search is not available in every language. See the supported languages list for complete availability.

Searchable predictive-search content

Predictive search uses the following properties by default.

Resource	Property
Products	Title
	Product type
	Variant title
	Vendor
Pages	Title
Collections	Title
Blog posts	Title

You can translate store content with apps such as Translate & Adapt. For details about translations and searchable properties, see the Predictive Search API searchable-properties guidance

Note

Advanced changes to predictive-search result limits and searchable properties are available through the Predictive Search API. These changes require API and web-design expertise, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Liquid

Supported languages

Your primary locale determines which search behaviors are available. Typo tolerance corrects close misspellings, search stemming recognizes related word forms, and trigram support enables partial-character matching for Japanese.

Language	Typo tolerance	Search stemming	Trigram
English	✔	✔
French	✔
Spanish	✔
Portuguese (Brazil)	✔
German	✔
Dutch	✔
Italian	✔
Japanese		✔	✔ Can support Katakana, hiragana, and kanji
Danish	✔
Swedish	✔
Portuguese (Portugal)	✔
Finnish	✔
Norwegian (Bokmål)	✔
Turkish	✔
Romanian	✔
Hungarian	✔
Russian	✔
Polish	✔
Czech	✔
Greek	✔
Icelandic	✔
Lithuanian	✔
Slovenian	✔
Slovak	✔
Bulgarian	✔
Vietnamese	✔
Croatian	✔
Indonesian	✔
Latvian	✔
Estonian	✔
Serbian	✔
Ukrainian	✔
Catalan	✔
Norwegian (Nynorsk)	✔
Faroese	✔
Portuguese	✔
Albanian	✔
Bosnian	✔
Afrikaans	✔
Macedonian	✔
Armenian	✔
Serbo-Croatian	✔
Latin	✔
Welsh	✔
Gaelic	✔
Moldovan	✔

Search syntax

The following behaviors do not apply when a search uses search syntax:

1. Typo tolerance
2. Predictive search
3. Semantic understanding

Singular and plural terms

Search recognizes many singular and plural forms. For example, searching for puppies can match results containing either “puppy” or “puppies.”

This behavior is called stemming: words are matched to a common base form. For example, body:leggings can match results containing “leg” or “leggings.” For partial word matching, use prefix search

Typo tolerance

Typo tolerance helps return matches for terms containing minor spelling errors. It can match terms that differ by one letter or have two letters in a different order, provided the first four letters are entered correctly.

For example, chocollate can return results containing chocolate or chocolates in the title or description.

Tip

Typo tolerance does not account for alternate spellings. Create synonym groups in the Search & Discovery app for those terms. Learn more about customizing synonym groups

Typo tolerance does not apply to every searchable field. For example, chocollate does not match product or blog-post tags containing chocolate.

Resource type	Supported fields
Products	title, product_type, variants.title, vendor
Pages	author, title
Blog posts	author, title

AND, OR, and NOT operators

1. AND: Results must include every term. AND is the default, so artichoke hearts and artichoke AND hearts both find results containing “artichoke” and “hearts.”
2. OR: Results can include either term. For example, artichoke OR hearts finds results containing at least one of those terms.
3. NOT: Prefix a term with a minus sign to exclude it. For example, artichoke -heart finds “artichoke” but excludes “heart.”

Prefix search

Prefix search automatically matches the beginning of terms. For example, artich can match “artichoke,” and artichoke hea can match terms that begin with “artichoke hea.”

Phrase search

Place a term or phrase in double quotation marks to search for that exact wording in a searchable field. For example, "artichoke hearts" can match a product titled “Can of artichoke hearts,” but not “Canned hearts of artichoke.”

Searching specific fields

Add a field name followed by a colon to limit a term to that field. For example, title:artichoke searches titles containing “artichoke.”

Field-specific searches require an exact match, so a misspelled query such as title:artichoqe does not return results. Available properties vary by resource type.

Resource	Searchable properties
Products	body, product_type, tag, title, variants.barcode, variants.sku, variants.title, vendor
Pages	author, body, title
Blog posts	author, body, tag, title

Trigram search

Trigram search is available only for the Japanese locale. It matches consecutive sequences of at least three katakana, hiragana, or kanji characters, and can also search kanji in pairs.

For example, to find “アップルグリーンラップドレス,” customers can search using:

1. ップル
2. アップル
3. ップルグリーンラ