Smart Groups

Algolia Smart Groups give you precise control over how search results are organized and displayed. You can place groups of items that match specific criteria at specific positions in your search results. Smart Groups streamline curation by applying rules-based results placement logic to entire groups of items, eliminating the need to manually manage individual product positions in your search experience.

Use cases

You might use Smart Groups to highlight sponsored or featured products at strategic positions in your results, promote time-sensitive inventory like new arrivals or clearance items, create visually cohesive clusters of related products, or implement sophisticated merchandising strategies that update automatically based on your business rules.

Monetize your results grid

With Smart Groups, you can highlight products and content from a preferred brand or partner.

Sample scenario: you want to promote a group of products based on a contract with a particular brand, to feature them in top positions on high-grossing categories or queries. For example, for your Footwear category, you can create a group filtered by the brand = Adidas, with 2 items, placed at position 5 in the results grid.

Highlight new, trending, on-sale, high-margin results

Sample scenario: you want to highlight a group of results in promotion, on-sale, new, trending, highly rated, or high-margin products to optimize performance towards your business goals, such as increasing conversion of best sellers or new products or products with high margins.

For your Dresses category, you create a group filtered by the attribute = High margin, with 4 items, placed at position 5 in the results grid.

Create visual experiences by grouping results

With Smart Groups, you can create visually cohesive experiences by grouping products or results that share similarities.

Sample scenario: you want to highlight autumn colors given the time of year in some categories.

For your Women category, you create:

• A group filtered by the attribute color = brown, with 4 items, placed at position 1 in the results grid
• A group filtered by attribute color = cream, with 4 items placed at position 5 in the results grid

You can define up to 3 groups.

Key concepts

Composition

An entity in Algolia that helps you compose results with more control, including to insert groups into regular results. You can think of a composition as a dynamic results feed.

Results feed

Any ranked results list of search or browse results you have on your website or app. For example, you might have UK product results feeds, a UK content results feed, a UK help results feed, and equivalents for your French website.

Composition rule

A type of rule for defining when and where to insert Smart Groups, for a given search query, category page, or matching context.

Smart group

A smart group is a group of results that match certain criteria, inserted in a specific position into the results feed. The API refers to a group as injectedItem.

Composition rules and index rules

Index rules apply to both the main results (organic results before group injection) and the group results. Both main and group results are based on subqueries to retrieve and rank the best matching or most relevant records. Each subquery can trigger index rules.

A group subquery is based on the top-level query and filters and context of the conditions of the main results query, plus (AND) the filters specified in the group’s applied filters.

Composition rules have higher precedence than index-level rules. For example, if you have an index-level rule to pin a record to position 3 and a group injected also at position 3, the group and its items is placed at position 3 and up (depending on the number of items in the group). The pinned item is placed in the next available position after the group.

Difference between Smart Groups and pinning and boosting

Pinning records with index-level rules requires you to pin items one-by-one statically. You need to keep your pins up-to-date over time, for example, when an item goes out of stock. In comparison, group injections let you pin a group of items dynamically based on certain attribute criteria. Since it’s based on a subquery search, the most relevant matching product items get selected, and you don’t need to manually keep the items up-to-date.

Boosting records with index-level rules is less specific than Smart Groups in terms of how many items get placed and into which specific position they go.