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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.
To index your data, the Algolia AI Search & Discovery app uses the Shopify API and webhooks.

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Full reindexing

When you install the app in your store, it automatically starts indexing your data. This is called a full reindex. You can trigger full reindexes in the Indexing tab. Indexing status screen in the Shopify admin

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Automatic updates

The app is designed to automatically keep your data up to date. It uses Shopify webhooks to know when you make updates to your Shopify catalog and to immediately push the changes.
Shopify doesn’t provide webhooks for blog posts and pages To keep your search up to date, the app runs a full reindex of articles and pages every day. For intermediate updates, manually trigger a full reindexing from the Indexing tab.

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Indexing jobs

To index your data while keeping your data consistent and respecting Shopify’s rate limiting, the app uses an indexing queue: all your indexing jobs wait until they can be processed. You can see the number of queued indexing jobs in the Indexing tab of the app.
Whenever you notice that your data isn’t up to date, you should check the indexing queue. Every data packet that is either waiting to be or is actively being processed is listed here, alongside a progress bar.
The indexing queue screen in the Shopify admin

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Algolia operations

With automatic updates, the app generates the required indexing operations to keep your data in sync with Algolia. Different Shopify data types require a different number of indexing operations:
  • Product updates Each product update triggers one indexing operation per variant. For example, updating 5 products with 4 variants each results in 20 indexing operations.
  • Collection updates If collection indexing is enabled, each collection update triggers one indexing operation per collection. If you use the Collection pages feature or Enable faceting on collections setting, a collection update also triggers one indexing operation per product variant per collection.
    • Example without Collection Pages: updating 2 collections (one with 20 product variants, the other with 30) results in 2 indexing operations (one per collection).
    • Example with Collection Pages: updating 2 collections (one with 20 product variants, the other with 30) results in 52 indexing operations: 2 for the collections and 50 for their 20 and 30 product variants.
  • Order updates Each order update generates 1 indexing operation. For example, if the app received 20 order updates, it will generate 20 indexing operations.
When performing a full reindex, similar numbers apply:
  • Full product reindex The number of indexing operations generated is equal to the total number of published variants in the store.
  • Full collection reindex The number of indexing operations is equal to the total number of published collections. If you enable the Collection Pages feature or the Enable faceting on collections option, the app makes extra indexing operations equal to the number of variants in those collections.
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