Six practical probes for your own store. Start with products you know exist, change one thing at a time, and judge what a shopper actually sees.
About five minutes. No setup or analytics access needed.
Pick one important product category and one in-stock product you can verify in the catalogue. Use examples that fit your store and market; the examples below only show the shape of each test.
Compare every variation with the query you already know works. A genuine catalogue gap is not a search failure, and a different result count is not automatically a problem.
Mark what you see after each test. “Usable, but weak” means a shopper can recover; “clear miss” means the experience gives them a credible reason to leave.
1 / 6
Copy the full name of an in-stock product and search it exactly as written. This is your retrieval baseline.
2 / 6
Take a common product query that works and transpose or replace one letter. Compare the two result sets.
3 / 6
Compare your catalogue term with a common synonym or regional expression your customers actually use.
4 / 6
Add exactly one visible, verifiable requirement to a working product query—colour, material, audience, size or availability.
5 / 6
Try one realistic local variation: missing diacritics, plural form, or a word shoppers commonly merge or split.
6 / 6
On a phone-sized screen, run a broad product search and apply one useful filter such as size, price or in-stock status.
0 of 6 probes reviewed
Judge the visible customer experience, not whether the engine technically returned something.
This check is designed to expose visible dead ends quickly. It cannot tell you how often they happen, which catalogue segments are affected, or whether a fix improves the rest of your query set.
A full audit repeats these probes systematically across real query patterns, products, languages and customer intents. It separates retrieval, interpretation, ranking and interface failures before prioritising the fixes by customer impact.
Tell us about your store, your search platform and what you want to improve. We will work out where it makes sense to start.
Discuss your search