Everything you'd want to know before you install.
A detailed look at how AI Semantic Search — PrestaShop works, why we built it the way we did, and the thinking behind the features above.
§ 01
Internal search is the most overlooked conversion lever
A visitor who uses the search bar has strong purchase intent. Yet PrestaShop's native search relies on keyword matching: it fails as soon as the customer uses a synonym, makes a typo or describes what they want in their own words. Every “no results” is a lost sale and a customer who leaves for a competitor.
§ 02
How semantic search works
The module turns each product — name, brand, categories, features, description — into a numerical vector (embedding) using an AI model. At search time, the customer's query is converted into a vector the same way, then compared against the whole catalog by cosine similarity. The result: products are ranked by closeness of meaning, not by literal presence of words. “Shoes for running in the rain” surfaces your waterproof running shoes, even if that exact phrase appears nowhere.
§ 03
Hybrid mode: meaning without ever missing the obvious
Purely semantic search can sometimes under-rank an exact product-name match. Hybrid mode fixes this by boosting products whose name contains the query keywords. You get the relevance of AI plus the reliability of classic search, combined in a single ranking.
§ 04
Control your costs and your privacy
Choose your embedding provider: OpenAI, Mistral AI for European GDPR-compliant hosting, or any OpenAI-compatible gateway. The query cache avoids re-billing repeated searches, and checksum-based re-indexing ensures a price or stock update triggers no unnecessary API call. You keep full control of the model, the dimensions and the budget.
§ 05
Built for production
Batch indexing with a progress bar, scheduled indexing via a secured cron, automatic cleanup of disabled products, query logging to understand what your customers search for. Multistore and multilingual compatible, without Composer or jQuery, following PrestaShop 8 and 9 conventions.
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