Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are on the rise, fueled by the spectacular expansion and use of ChatGPT. AI employs machine learning to learn and develop from experience automatically, and it can be used in various ways to help businesses grow. 

In the online retail industry, AI is helping to improve customer experience, product discovery, personalization, recommendation systems, inventory management, fraud detection, and chatbots to serve at least 28% of the worldwide population. 

In today's article, we'll handpick some of the best AI search solutions for digital stores.

What To Consider When Choosing An AI Search Solution?

Your site search connects shoppers with the products they want. A powerful and effective search tool enhances the product discovery journey by understanding customer intent and delivering hyper-relevant results within milliseconds. More than three-quarters of consumers use the search function on retail websites, making it the most popular approach to product discovery.

When selecting an AI search tool, consider factors like the size of your product catalog, scalability requirements, customization options, and integration capabilities with your ecommerce platform. Evaluating each tool's pricing structure and customer support is essential to ensure it aligns with your business needs.

Best AI Search Tools For Ecommerce Businesses

With those factors in mind, we'll walk you through some of the renowned AI-powered search solutions leveraging thousands of online businesses all over the globe.

Algolia 

Algolia is a powerful search and discovery platform that provides advanced search capabilities for websites and applications. It is designed to enhance the search experience and improve the discoverability of content, particularly in the realm of ecommerce. Algolia's infrastructure is designed for high availability and scalability, ensuring fast and reliable search.

Algolia

(Source: Algolia)

Pricing: Free plan available.

Key features:

  • Lightning-fast and relevant search: offer fast search results with instant and real-time updates. Its search engine is built for speed, providing users with highly relevant and accurate results even with large datasets.
  • Typo tolerance and autocomplete: understand user intent and account for typos, misspellings, and linguistic variations. Algolia's autocomplete feature also suggests search queries as users type, helping them find products or content faster. It provides typo-tolerant search results, ensuring users find what they want.
  • Faceted navigation: enable faceted navigation, allowing users to refine search results using filters and facets such as price range, category, brand, or any other relevant attribute. This helps users narrow down their search and find exactly what they need.
  • Personalization and recommendations: provide personalized search and recommendation capabilities. It leverages user behavior, preferences, and purchase history to deliver customized search results and recommendations, improving the overall customer experience and driving conversions.
  • Analytics and insights: comprehensive analytics into user search behavior, popular queries, click-through rates, and more. This data helps businesses understand customer preferences, optimize search performance, and make data-driven decisions.
  • Developer-friendly APIs and SDKs: provide developer-friendly APIs and software development kits (SDKs) for easy integration into various platforms and frameworks. This makes it convenient for developers to implement Algolia's search functionality into their websites or applications.

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is an open-source search engine that can be integrated into your ecommerce platform. It provides powerful full-text search capabilities, real-time data analysis, and scalability for large product catalogs.

Elasticsearch open-source search engine

(Source: Elasticsearch)

Pricing: Free trial available. Starts from $95/month. 

Key features:

  • Full-text search: robust full-text search capabilities, allowing users to perform complex searches across various fields and attributes. It supports features like relevance scoring, highlighting, fuzzy search, and multi-language support.
  • Distributed and scalable: Elasticsearch is built to handle large-scale data and provides distributed architecture, allowing it to scale horizontally across multiple nodes. This enables efficient storage, retrieval, and data processing, ensuring high performance even with significant amounts of data.
  • Real-time data analysis: real-time data analysis makes it suitable for use cases requiring instant insights and analytics. It provides aggregations, filtering, and sorting options to perform advanced analytics on data stored in Elasticsearch.
  • Document-oriented: stores and indexes structured or semi-structured data as documents. Hence, handling complex data structures and enabling efficient searching and filtering based on document attributes will be easier.
  • RESTful APIs make interacting with and integrating into different applications and systems effortless: This allows developers to leverage Elasticsearch's search and analytics capabilities within their applications or build custom search experiences.
  • Ecosystem and integration: Elasticsearch is part of the Elastic Stack, which includes other components like Logstash for data ingestion and Kibana for data visualization. It integrates well with popular tools and frameworks, allowing for a seamless data pipeline and analytics ecosystem.

Boost AI Search & Discovery 

Boost AI Search & Discovery by Boost Commerce is a robust Shopify tool to assist online merchants in increasing sales and the key to unlocking sales breakthroughs. AI technology is all over the internet right now. Still, at Boost, they've been incorporating AI into their work for years to eventually bring e-store owners the most excellent AI-powered search, product recommendations, Shopify filter, and visual merchandising.

Boost AI Search & Discovery

(Source: Boost Commerce)

Pricing: Free plan available. Starts from $19/month. 

Key features:

  • AI-fueled search: improve your customers' search experience by instantly providing relevant results that fulfill their search intent. No matter what customers type, they'll find what they seek.
  • AI-powered recommendations: give customers more of what they love by creatively engaging them with multiple savvy recommendation types that cover every essential touchpoint.
  • Visual merchandising: power up your product display strategy with flexible & high-performing merchandising rules.
  • Enhanced analytics: unlock a new horizon of growth with insightful analytics that enables more intelligent business decisions. Get to know your customers better by understanding their product discovery journey.
  • Integrations: Integrates with 30+ leading Shopify apps to enhance the shopping experience.
  • Powerful with highly secured multi-regional infrastructure. 
  • Dedicated 5-star support team.

Coveo

Coveo offers an AI-powered search and personalization solution for ecommerce. It uses machine learning algorithms to understand user intent, deliver relevant search results, and provide personalized recommendations.

Coveo

(Source: Coveo)

Pricing: 2 plans available.

Key features:

  • Personalization and recommendations: advanced personalization capabilities allow businesses to tailor search results, suggestions, and content based on each user's preferences, behavior, and past interactions. This helps drive engagement, conversions, and customer loyalty.
  • Unified search experience: provide a unified search experience across multiple channels and touchpoints, including websites, e-commerce platforms, customer support portals, and more. This ensures consistency and a seamless search experience for users across different platforms.
  • Advanced analytics: comprehensive analytics and insights into user behavior, search patterns, and engagement metrics. It provides actionable data that can be used to optimize search relevance, identify content gaps, and make data-driven decisions to improve the overall user experience.
  • AI-powered relevance tuning: Coveo allows businesses to fine-tune search relevance and ranking using AI algorithms. It provides tools and features to adjust search rankings easily, boost specific content, create synonyms, and manage relevance rules to ensure the most pertinent results are displayed to users.
  • Self-learning capabilities: Coveo's AI algorithms continuously learn and adapt based on user interactions and feedback. This enables the platform to improve search relevance and personalization, ensuring users receive increasingly accurate and tailored search results.
  • Integration and scalability: Coveo integrates with various systems, content management platforms, e-commerce platforms, and other business applications. It is scalable and can handle large volumes of data, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes.

Searchspring

Searchspring offers an AI-powered search and merchandising platform for ecommerce. It provides advanced search functionality, dynamic filters, product boosting, and behavioral analytics to optimize search results and improve conversions.

Searchspring

(Source: Searchspring)

Pricing: Starts from $599/month.

Key features:

  • Advanced search functionality: Searchspring offers powerful search capabilities, including typo tolerance, auto-suggestions, and synonym management. It ensures that customers can easily find relevant products even if they make spelling errors or use different terms.
  • Intelligent merchandising: With Searchspring, businesses can strategically merchandise their products to highlight specific items, categories, or promotions. The platform enables manual and automated product sorting, boosting, and rules-based merchandising to optimize product placement and drive sales.
  • Personalization and recommendations: Searchspring leverages AI algorithms to provide personalized search results and recommendations. It analyzes user behavior, preferences, and purchase history to deliver tailored product suggestions, increasing engagement and conversion rates.
  • Dynamic filters and faceted navigation: Searchspring offers active filters and faceted navigation, allowing customers to refine their search results based on various attributes such as price, brand, color, size, and more. This lets shoppers quickly narrow down their options and find desired products.
  • Insights and analytics: The platform provides robust insights into search trends, customer behavior, popular queries, and conversion metrics. This data helps businesses better understand customers, optimize search strategies, and make informed merchandising decisions.
  • Visual search: Searchspring incorporates visual search capabilities, enabling customers to search for products using images rather than text. This feature enhances the shopping experience and facilitates product discovery based on visual cues.
  • Mobile optimization: Searchspring offers mobile-optimized search and navigation experiences to ensure seamless and intuitive search functionality on mobile devices. This is crucial in today's mobile-driven ecommerce landscape.
  • Integration and flexibility: Searchspring integrates with popular ecommerce platforms and content management systems, making it easy to implement and manage. It provides flexibility for customization and tailors the search and merchandising experiences to align with the unique needs of each business.

Final Thoughts

We understand how difficult it can be to select the correct app. These are the most outstanding apps we’ve discovered during our investigation, and we sincerely hope one of them is a good fit for your store.