Search queries
Everything shoppers ask of your catalog, alongside any queries you import directly. This page covers how they're captured, how to read the views and filters, and what each piece of the page does.
What a search query is
A search query is one search a shopper (or your code) ran. Two ways they end up in your corpus.
- Live
- A shopper typed it into your storefront search. These flow in automatically once signals capture is on. For direct-API integrations, every call to /v1/items/search is captured the same way.
- Imported
- You uploaded them yourself from historical analytics or a sample list. See Import search queries.
Both kinds sit in the same corpus and feed the same surfaces. Intelligence uses the full corpus to read demand, and the dashboard's Search Lab page calls the same API your storefront does. The difference is bookkeeping: each query carries a source tag (Live or Imported) so you can filter the views to one or the other.
Activity
The strip at the top of the page shows four counts.
- Captured all time
- Every query in your corpus, regardless of when it landed.
- Last 7 days
- Queries captured in the rolling seven-day window.
- Last 24 hours
- Same idea, shorter window.
- Needs attention
- Only shown when there are any. Queries that failed to process. Click to jump to them in the list with the filter pre-applied.
Volume chart
The chart underneath the Activity strip shows query volume over the selected time window. Live and Imported are stacked when both are present, so a sudden spike from a one-off import is visually distinct from a real shopper-traffic bump. Hover for the exact count in each bucket.
Latest vs Top
Two views, switchable in the tabs.
- Latest
- Default. A chronological log of individual query events, most recent first. Each row is one search, so the same query text appearing twice shows up as two rows. Use Latest when you want to see what's happening right now.
- Top
- The same queries, but grouped by normalized text (case, whitespace, and trailing punctuation collapse) and ordered by frequency. Use Top when you want to see what shoppers are asking most often.
Filters
Time window and source apply to both views. Status applies only to Latest.
- Time window
- Last 24h, Last 7 days, Last 30 days, or All time.
- Source
- All, Live, or Imported. Match the view to the audience: Live for "what real shoppers are doing today"; Imported for "what was in the analytics dump I uploaded last week."
- Status
- Latest only. Same four states as Items: Processed, Processing, Updating, Needs attention. Most queries land Processed within a few seconds. Needs attention happens rarely and usually points to a query the system couldn't make sense of at all.
Drill into a query
Clicking a row in either view opens Query metrics: how often this query has been seen, the items it surfaces most often, and how those have shifted over time. Useful when you want to understand whether a specific search is finding the right products.