Introduction to Shopify indexing

Learn how indexing works with the Algolia AI Search & Discovery app for Shopify.

Autocomplete, InstantSearch, and Recommend in the Algolia app blocks now support version 5 of the Algolia API client. Most stores only need to switch the search client version setting to Version 5. If you use custom storefront JavaScript, follow the version 5 upgrade guide. Support for version 4 ends on August 14, 2026.

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

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.

Automatic updates

The app automatically keeps your data up to date. It uses Shopify webhooks to detect changes to your Shopify catalog. When you update your catalog, the app pushes the changes right away.

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.

Indexing jobs

The app indexes your data through an indexing queue. This keeps your data in sync and respects Shopify’s rate limiting. Your indexing jobs wait in the queue until the app processes them. You can see the number of queued indexing jobs in the Indexing tab of the app.

If your data isn’t up to date, check the indexing queue. This list shows every data packet that’s waiting or being processed, along with a progress bar.

Algolia operations

With automatic updates, the app creates indexing operations. These operations keep your data in sync with Algolia. Different Shopify data types need different numbers 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.

  With product-level indexing, a product update triggers one operation per product instead of one per variant. The same update then results in 5 operations. An update to a single variant rewrites its whole product record. Stores that update variants often see a smaller drop than the product counts suggest.

• 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, each collection update also triggers one indexing operation per product variant.

  • 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 creates 1 indexing operation. For example, if the app receives 20 order updates, it creates 20 indexing operations.

When performing a full reindex, similar numbers apply:

• Full product reindex

  The number of indexing operations equals the total number of published variants in the store. In product-level mode, it equals the total number of published products instead.

• Full collection reindex

  The number of indexing operations equals the total number of published collections. If you enable the Collection Pages feature or the Enable faceting on collections option, the app adds one extra indexing operation per variant in those collections.