How Product Search Works
Understand how customers search your store and how results are ranked so you can optimize your product listings
Overview
CMS Max uses a full-text search system that delivers fast, relevant results across your entire product catalog. Search results are ranked by relevance — not just whether a word appears, but where it appears and how closely it matches — so customers find what they're looking for quickly.
What Gets Searched
When a customer searches your store, the system looks across all of these product fields:
Highest relevance — matches here push products to the top of results:
- Product title
- SKU
- GTIN / barcode
Strong supporting signal — these fields contribute meaningfully to relevance:
- Brand name
- Category name
- Meta description
Broad content matching — these fields are searched but carry less weight:
- Tags
- Product description
- Page content
- Variant options
How Results Are Ranked
The system ranks results using several signals, applied in order:
- Exact title match — Products whose title exactly matches the search term appear first.
- Brand and category match — Searching for a brand name returns all products from that brand, ranked by relevance.
- Supporting metadata and content — Tags, variant values, descriptions, and page content provide broader matching signals.
- Recency as a tiebreaker — When relevance scores are equal, newer products appear first.
Two Ways to Search
Site-Wide Search Customers searching from the main search bar get results across your entire site — including products, pages, blog posts, events, locations, and job openings. This is ideal for customers who aren't sure whether what they're looking for is a product or a page.
Product Catalog Search (the Shop page) Customers browsing your shop can search within the product catalog specifically, with additional filtering options for price range, brands, categories, descriptive product tags, and purchasable variant values such as Color and Size. This is optimized for product discovery and comparison.
These filters only show values used by products in the complete matching search result. This includes products on later result pages, so moving between pages does not unexpectedly change the available filters.
Advanced Search Techniques
Customers can use these techniques for more precise searches:
| Syntax | What It Does | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Quoted phrase | Finds exact phrase in that order | "blue dream" |
| Minus sign | Excludes a term from results | gummies -thc |
| Multiple words | Searches across all fields | wyld strawberry |
| SKU lookup | Finds a product by its exact SKU | SKU-10042 |
Optimizing Your Products for Search
Because the system ranks results by where terms appear, the quality of your product data directly affects how easy products are to find:
- Product titles carry the most weight — use clear, descriptive names that customers would actually search for.
- SKUs are searched with highest priority — make sure they are entered accurately.
- GTINs are also top-priority — add barcodes where available.
- Tags support broader matching — use them for attributes customers search by (e.g., material, dietary preference, style).
- Brand and category assignments matter — ensure every product is correctly categorized and assigned to the right brand.
- Product descriptions help with longer-tail searches — write descriptions that include natural language customers might use.