Predictive Search API reference

The following example request retrieves predictive results for a specified search query:

The following example is a response to a successful request to the /{locale}/search/suggest.json endpoint, which contains resource objects associated with the specified query:

When a request to the /{locale}/search/suggest.json endpoint is unsuccessful, one of the following error responses is returned:

• Invalid parameter error
• Expectation failed
• Too many requests

Any other errors not listed will return a 5xx status code.

All errors related to the request parameters are returned with a 422 status code and a relevant error message. The description field describes the request error.

If your theme isn't using one of the supported languages, then the API returns the following error:

Exceeding the request throttle limit will return a 429 status code with a relevant error message.

In this case, the response will also contain an HTTP header with the Retry-After value in seconds.

The following example request retrieves the HTML from a section rendered with the predictive results for a specified search query.

The /search/suggest endpoint supports the same query parameters as the /search/suggest.json endpoint, in addition to the following:

The response to a successful request to the /{locale}/search/suggest endpoint.

The section response contains the HTML of the provided section rendered with the predictive_search object containing the results of the specified query.

For example, the following section would generate the following section response:

When a request to the /{locale}/search/suggest endpoint is unsuccessful, one of the following error status codes is returned:

You can output the response text to get more details about an error. Refer to the example request using Fetch to learn more.

Search results are based on different searchable properties, depending on the resource type that you include in your query.

When searching a translated storefront, you can search the following properties:

Predictive search includes typo tolerance, which lets search terms containing typos return the correct matching search results.

Typo tolerance is set to 1, which means that search displays results that differ from the search term by 1 letter, or results that have 2 letters in a different order. The first 4 letters of a search term need to be entered correctly for typo tolerance to take effect.

The following fields support typo tolerance:

Predictive search supports partial word matches. This means that it suggests results even if the word you've entered is still incomplete. For example, if you enter sweate, then you might see a suggested search result for sweater.

Predictive search has the following limitations when it applies partial word matches:

• If a search query has more than one term, then partial word matches are applied only to the last term in the query.
• Partial word matches are applied only to the end of a search term. For example, if you enter book, then you won't see a suggested search result for ebook.
• Partial word matches are supported only for themes using specific languages. For more details, refer to Requirements and limitations.

Predictive search uses a different search engine than storefront search. Because of this, it doesn't handle partial word matches in the same way. Although predictive search supports partial word matches, storefront search supports them only if the prefix option parameter is set to last.

This section contains information about how predictive search is supported, and any current limitations.

Predictive search is supported only for themes that use the following theme languages:

• English
• French
• Spanish
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• German
• Dutch
• Italian
• 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

A script tag in the <head> section indicates whether predictive search is supported for the theme language: <script id="shopify-features"></script>. This script tag includes a JSON-encoded predictiveSearch key with a boolean value. When it's set to true, the theme language is supported, and predictive search is enabled. Otherwise, it's set to false.

• Individual products can't be excluded from predictive search results. If a product is hidden from search engines and sitemaps with the metafield seo.hidden, then it won't appear in predictive search results. Learn more about hiding resources with this metafield.
• The API returns no more than 10 predictive suggestions per request type.
• 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 the store's primary language (shop primary locale) and the customer's online store session (buyer locale) to be in English.