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Merchandising Studio lets you visually configure merchandising for search and category pages and review analytics.
This feature isn’t available on every plan. Refer to your pricing plan to see if it’s included.

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A new way to merchandise with Magento

Whenever possible, use Merchandising Studio. Avoid the legacy merchandising features in the Algolia extension for Magento. Algolia won’t add new legacy merchandising features to the extension. Merchandising Studio has these benefits over the legacy extension features:
  • Centralized rule management. This prevents the Magento integration from overwriting rules managed in Merchandising Studio.
  • You can do more than just pinning items such as:
    • Boosting and burying attributes
    • Dynamic Re-Ranking
    • Results filtering
    • Sorting strategies
  • You can apply several merchandising strategies at once.
The legacy Magento merchandising feature creates Manual Rules in Algolia. The Merchandising Studio integration creates Visual Rules instead.

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Enable Merchandising Studio

To use the Merchandising Studio with Magento, upgrade the Algolia extension to version 3.11 or later. Version 3.11 also adds support for creating Visual Editor rules for categories in the Algolia dashboard.
To enable Merchandising Studio, go to Stores > Configuration > Algolia Search > Products. Set Enable visual merchandising support to Yes: Enable visual merchandising for both Visual Editor rules and Merchandising Studio support After you enable this setting, specify a category page identifier: Use the category page ID attribute to tell Magento where to store data for Merchandising Studio. Enter the name of the attribute in your indexed product . This attribute acts as the category page identifier. The default name for this attribute is categoryPageId. After making your changes:
  1. Save your settings in the Magento admin.
  2. Clear your local Magento config cache by running: bin/magento cache:flush config
  3. Re-run the full Algolia product indexer:
The reindex adds a category attribute to your records and to attributesForFaceting.
Run a full product reindex after turning on visual merchandising support. If you enable support for visual merchandising in Magento but skip the indexing step, your category pages won’t load products from the Algolia correctly.

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Category page identifiers

Once Algolia has indexed your products with the new category page identifier, configure Merchandising Studio to use this information:
  1. In the Algolia dashboard, select Merchandising Studio in the top right. Screenshot of a drop-down menu showing 'Algolia Dashboard' and 'Merchandising Studio' options, with a red arrow pointing to 'Merchandising Studio'.
  1. Go to Settings > Category Page Identifiers: Screenshot of the 'Settings' page in Algolia Merchandising Studio, highlighting 'Category Page Identifiers' with its description.
  2. The Magento integration formats your category data for you. You can ignore the warning “Category pages only work with certain types of implementations”. Click I’m good. Let’s go. Screenshot of the 'Category Page Identifiers' section, showing a button labeled 'the user is good, you can go' highlighted with a red border.
  3. Select the same category identifier you configured in the Magento admin.
The following example uses categoryPageId, which is the default attribute name: Merchandising studio category page ID attribute selection

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Subcategory separator

Even though the Magento extension marks it optional, you must set the Custom subcategory separator. The Magento extension uses /// as the default category separator. You must configure the Merchandising Studio to match. This setting is whitespace-sensitive. Make sure to include leading and trailing spaces: Screenshot of a 'Custom subcategory separator (optional)' field with '///' entered, under 'Category Page Identifiers'. If you want to use a different subcategory separator, update both your Magento and Merchandising Studio settings.
  1. In Magento, go to Stores > Configuration > Algolia Search > Categories > Category separator. Change the separator there.
  2. Reindex your products in Algolia.
  3. Set the custom subcategory separator in Merchandising Studio to the same value.
If you change your category separator in Magento, run a full product reindex. Otherwise, your category pages won’t render correctly on your store front.

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Supported features

The visual merchandising setting in Magento lets you merchandise category pages with Algolia Rules. The Magento integration supports the following features in the Algolia Merchandising Studio: The following features require customizing your frontend libraries: For more information, see Custom frontend events.

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Dynamic Re-Ranking

To apply Dynamic Re-Ranking to Magento categories:
  1. In the Algolia dashboard, go to Search > Enhance > Re-Ranking > Settings.
  2. In the Browse Facet box, enter the category page ID attribute you set up earlier.
For example, to use Dynamic Re-Ranking on the attribute categoryPageId: Screenshot of a drop-down menu in 'Browsing Facet' showing options: 'categories,' 'category ID,' 'categoryPageId,' 'color,' 'cost,' and 'price. EUR.default.'

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Dynamic facets

Starting with version 3.16 of the Magento extension, you can use Algolia Rules to adjust facets. This works on both your Magento store’s search results and category pages. Enable this feature from Stores > Configuration > Algolia Search > InstantSearch Results Page > Faceting > Enable dynamic facets. Dynamic facet support in Magento relies on the facet display feature. The renderingContent parameter controls this feature, which is itself part of Merchandising Studio.

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How dynamic faceting works in Magento

The Magento extension sets a default facet display for all product listing pages. It bases this on the attributes you configure under Stores > Configuration > Algolia Search > InstantSearch Results Page > Faceting > Facets. You can use an Algolia rule to override the default facet display. This happens when the user’s query or filters match the rule’s conditions. In the following example, this Magento store defines five facets: Screenshot of a table in the 'Merchandising Studio' showing faceted attributes like 'price', 'categories', and 'color' with their settings. After saving these facet display settings, you can find them under Search > Configure > Index > Configuration > Filtering and Faceting > Facet Display. Screenshot of a 'Facet display' list with attributes like 'price. USD.default' and 'color' ordered alphabetically, plus an add option. This setting controls which facets appear on a product listing page, and in what order.
Magento manages the facet display value, so don’t edit it in Algolia. To change how Magento builds the setting, see Overriding index settings.

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Apply dynamic facets with rules

First, check that Magento can update the facet display setting for your store’s product index. Then you can apply dynamic facets. In the following example, a category page shows the five facets applied earlier. For the Women > Tops category, the rule removes “Climate” and moves “Price” to the bottom of the facet list. Screenshot of a 'Tops' page showing a price slider and 'Climate' filter with options 'Indoor,' 'Warm,' 'Spring,' 'Cool,' and 'Mild,' highlighted with a red box and green arrow. To do this in Merchandising Studio, go to Merchandising Studio > Visual Merchandiser. Select “Category page”, search for the category “Women Tops”, and then select Curate this page: Screenshot of the Merchandising Studio interface showing a 'Category page' drop-down menu, a 'Women /// Tops' label, and a 'Curate this page' button.
To use Magento categories with Merchandising Studio, enable them from Magento admin.
Next, select Order facets where you can define the exact facets you want to display: Screenshot of the 'Merchandising Studio' page showing the 'Trigger' section with the 'Order facets' action highlighted.

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Configure facet display

The Facet Display feature only works with scalar values (single, distinct values). It can’t process Magento attributes like categories and prices directly. These are objects, not scalar values. When you add these attributes to your dynamic faceting rule, reference them using nested attributes. For example:
  • categories maps to categories.level0
  • price maps to price.USD.default
Prices may vary by factors such as the user’s locale and customer group. List all possible price attributes in your faceting rule. Inspect product records in the Algolia dashboard to identify the nested attributes created by the Magento extension. Add the following dynamic facets to the preceding example: Screenshot of facet ordering with 'categories.level0', 'color', 'size', and price facets sorted by 'Number of hits (descending)'. After you save the rule, the Magento store front uses the updated facet configuration. Dynamic faceting applied on a Magento product listing page

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Redirects

Starting with version 3.16 of the Magento extension, you can use Algolia Rules to redirect users to a page on your site based on a search query or a filter. Redirect features work with the extension’s Autocomplete and InstantSearch UI libraries. The extension turns on redirect by default for Autocomplete. It turns off redirect by default for InstantSearch.

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Use redirects with Autocomplete

To use redirects with Autocomplete, enable the feature in the Magento extension. Go to Stores > Configuration > Algolia Search > Autocomplete Menu > Redirects > Enable redirects: Once enabled, the feature works in one of three modes:
  • Don’t display the redirect (handle on form submit only). Screenshot of a search interface with 'yoga' entered, showing suggestions and product results like 'Bess Yoga Short' and 'a product name Yoga Pant'.
  • Display the redirect as a selectable item in place of search hits. Autocomplete redirect as a selectable item but no matching hits displayed
  • Display both search hits and a selectable redirect. Autocomplete redirect as a selectable item displayed with matching hits
You can set the selectable link to open in a new window. Form submissions must always target the current window.

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Use redirects with InstantSearch

To use redirects with InstantSearch, enable the feature in the Magento extension. Go to Stores > Configuration > Algolia Search > InstantSearch Results Page > Redirects > Enable redirects: The InstantSearch redirect feature has these options:
  • Redirect on page load. If InstantSearch loads search results that include a redirect, it sends the user straight there.
  • Trigger redirect on search as you type. As the user types their query in the searchBox widget, Algolia retrieves matching results as the user types. If a redirect exists for the search query, this setting sends the user to that URL.
  • Display redirect as a selectable item. If a search query has a redirect, display a clickable link to that URL above the search result hits. Selectable redirect link displayed in InstantSearch
  • Open redirect URL in a new window, which only applies to links.

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Migration of manual rules

The legacy Magento merchandiser creates manual rules. Merchandising Studio creates visual rules instead. Both types of rules can coexist. Older rules take priority over newer ones. Manual Rules created by the legacy Magento integration aren’t migrated automatically to Merchandising Studio. To switch to Merchandising Studio, delete the old rules. Then recreate them in the Algolia dashboard. You can automate this process by using the Rules API or the Algolia CLI.
Last modified on September 16, 2026