SAN FRANCISCO, May 6, 2025 – Algolia today introduces an intuitive, AI-powered feature: Smart Groups. Smart Groups provides merchandisers and content managers greater control over how products and items are displayed across search results and category pages. This new capability helps teams blend manual curation with AI-driven ranking—without relying on developer resources or time-consuming manual pinning.

Without Smart Groups, organizations managing large catalogs across retail, marketplaces, travel, media, and SaaS face three persistent challenges: first, controlling and tailoring results positioning on their site at scale with flexibility across thousands of diverse products or listings; second, minimizing developer and maintenance-intensive efforts for curation without compromising the user experience; and third, unlocking new revenue streams through smarter presentation of results and content. 

Solving the Complexities of Large Catalog Management

To help them stay ahead of the competition, Algolia provides more efficient ways to highlight new, sponsored, or promotional items, ensure consistency across channels, and retain customers in an increasingly crowded market.

Bharat Guruprakash, Chief Product Officer, Algolia said: “Managing large catalogs used to be an ordeal, however with Algolia’s Smart Groups, merchandisers can focus on creativity and strategy rather than endless manual adjustments. And importantly, they can set up Smart Groups themselves using an intuitive dashboard—no tech skills required!”

A Smarter Way to Curate, Promote, and Personalize

Using Algolia’s Smart Groups, merchandisers and content managers can dynamically define and match results by attribute or specific business logic—such as brand, color, or inventory status—and specify the exact number of items displayed at selected positions. For example, a merchandiser can decide that a shopper looking for "shoes," will automatically be presented with items matching specific brands or colors in the predefined positions on their site. What’s more, the items will be optimally ranked using Algolia’s AI Ranking to ensure the best order and relevance for accomplishing business goals.

How Smart Groups Works

Smart Groups provides merchandisers and content managers with advanced control over how they present their products to their intended consumers. It’s a game-changer for driving visibility and sales. Implementing, for example, merchandising strategies often requires cumbersome, highly time-consuming manual pinning items, one by one, in a product grid. 

Real-Time Automation and Scalability

Smart Groups offers automation that dynamically updates results based on selected criteria. If an item no longer meets the filter’s conditions (such as 'going out of stock’), the next qualifying item is automatically displayed in real-time without the need for constant updating. It is a highly scalable solution that makes it incredibly simple to achieve consistent, visually engaging, and relevant results.

Smart Groups Use Cases Across Industries

Algolia’s Smart Groups can be configured to support a wide range of industry use cases, including:

• Sponsored Results: Allocate premium positions to brand partners or campaign-backed products;

• Promotion Highlights: Showcase trending, on-sale, or newly released items with precision;

• Visual Merchandising: Create aesthetic layouts by grouping results with shared attributes like color or theme (e.g., color, season, or category);

• Content Programming: Enables content teams to prioritize featured content like articles or shows based on business goals—without engineering help. Content managers can dynamically highlight new releases, trending shows, or sponsored series using real-time audience insights, enabling agile, personalized curation; and,

• Financial products and content: Enables the delivery of specific types of credit card offers, investment products, or education modules. Smart Groups ensures the correct content reaches the right customer, maintains regulatory compliance, and scales personalization without adding operational complexity.

With the ability to combine curation, automation, and AI-driven ranking, Smart Groups is a powerful tool for enhancing product presentation, aligning content strategies with business goals. 

Retail Media: The Future of Monetized Merchandising

Looking ahead, Smart Groups has the potential to empower retailers to monetize prime positions within their product grids as valuable Retail Media spaces—a sector currently dominated by Amazon. As the market for Retail Media continues to expand, it is projected to account for nearly a quarter of all US media investment by 2028, according to Statista. By leveraging Smart Groups, retailers have the ability to honor brand agreements in which, for instance, they can ensure competing products do not appear together or must be in a specified position in search results, thus offering brands enhanced visibility and strategic placement opportunities.

Bharat Guruprakash added: “Smart Groups will eventually provide retailers and content managers with the means to unlock new revenue streams by leveraging their existing digital real estate to sell prime results positions to brands. This will not only generate additional revenue for retailers, but also create a strategic partnership model between the retailer and the brand that benefits both parties with increased exposure.”

To learn more about Smart Groups, visit: Smart Groups

About Algolia 

Algolia is a leading provider of AI search solutions, serving over 18,000 businesses and 500,000 developers globally. Renowned for its user-friendly API-First platform and the fastest AI search technology, Algolia is the largest hosted search engine, trusted by businesses and developers for 1.75 trillion searches per year. Backed by a decade of innovation, expertise, and growth, Algolia continuously redefines the search landscape with its commitment to user-friendly solutions, significant scalability, and unmatched speed. Learn more: www.algolia.com.