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As of December 31, 2023, Shopify no longer allows apps to modify theme code. To integrate Autocomplete and InstantSearch, use the Algolia AI Search & Discovery app’s App Embed and App Blocks. To get started, see Quickstart and Algolia configuration.
Named tags automatically generate key-value attribute pairs from specifically formatted tags. Shopify limits tags to 255 characters per tag. If you want to index longer strings, use metafields. Shopify lets you apply up to 250 tags to each product. If you’re adding many tags to your products, you should also keep your Algolia record size limit in mind.

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Enable named tags

To activate named tags, go to the Products section of the Indexing tab and select the Index named tags option. Enable named tags in your Shopify admin
Shopify stores tags as comma-separated strings. To use commas in your text values, use the encoded type.

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Add named tags to products

To add a named tag to a product, open the product’s page on Shopify and add a tag with the named tag format.

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Default tags

  • Format: attr:value
  • Extracts value as a string
  • Must not contain commas
  • Example: author:Isaac Asimov

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Boolean tags

  • Format: attr:boolean:value
  • Value can be true or false
  • Extracts value as a boolean
  • Example: suitable_for_children:boolean:true

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Number tags

  • Format: attr:number:value
  • Value can be an integer or decimal number
  • Extracts value as a number
  • Examples: age:number:34, alternative_price:number:199.90

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Encoded tags

  • Format attr:encoded:value
  • Extracts and decodes a URL-encoded value.
  • Can have commas
  • Example: alternative_name:encoded:Me%2C%20Myself%20and%20I
You need to replace , with %2C, but the URL-encoded approach offers a safe way to make sure that all characters are properly interpreted by Shopify’s tag engine.
To encode your string to this format, you can use:

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Restrict named tags to specific variants

Shopify tags are only available at the product level, so you can’t restrict them to a subset of your variants. Algolia provides a workaround with named tags. To do this, add a prefix in brackets to the named tag: [option_name:option_value]variant_tag:variant_tag_option. For example:
  • To add the named tag long_name:Small to a product’s size S variant, add the following tag to the product: [size:S]long_name:Small.
  • To add the named tag original_price:number:19.90 to a product’s size S and blue variant, add the following tag to the product: [size:S][color:blue]original_price:number:19.90
If a product has multiple options, such as size and color, and you specify only one, the named tag is applied to all matching variants that share that option. To target option values that begin with the same text, add an asterisk (*) at the end of the value. For example, [color:B*] matches all values that start with “B”, such as Blue and Brown.