When a pinned product becomes unavailable (because it went out of stock for example), Algolia previously filled that position with an organic search result, breaking the merchandiser's intended curation order. Now, we have introduced a new toggle “Shift pins to close gaps” in the Visual Editor when pinning which fixes this: enable the toggle on a rule and continuous pins will form a ‘pin block’ - when one pinned item inside the block becomes unavailable, the others shift up automatically. Off by default on existing rules, on by default for new ones. You can have many pin blocks or one big pin block. Learn more in this Algolia blog post and review the additional documentation here.

Merchandisers running time-sensitive campaigns - flash sales, Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions, midnight launches can now select a timezone directly in the date range picker when scheduling a rule. The Dashboard defaults to your browser's detected timezone and handles UTC conversion automatically on save, so promotions start and end exactly when intended. Available in the Visual Editor.

Understanding your analytics is key to improving search performance, but finding issues or opportunities can take time.

AI Assist can now answer questions about your search analytics within the Algolia dashboard. Looking for a general overview? Ask Assist to summarize your search performance, highlight recent trends, or identify opportunities for improvement. Or, if you want to drill down into a specific question, ask about individual metrics or compare performance across indices or time periods.

To get started, open Assist and click “Analyze my search performance”, or ask your analytics question in natural language.

If you need to work with your data outside the dashboard, Assist can also generate downloadable CSVs containing the analytics you've requested, making it easy to continue your analysis offline.

Strong search starts with the right relevance settings, but it's easy for search configuration to move away from best practices over time.

You can now optimise key search settings with AI Assist, in line with your search goals and Algolia’s best practice. To start, ask AI Assist to “improve my search configuration” and select an existing index. Assist will ask a couple of questions on your industry and search goals, which will tailor its recommendations for the following core search settings: Searchable attributes, Custom ranking, Ranking and Sorting, and Typo Tolerance.

Using Algolia’s best practices, your current index configuration and information on your search goals, Assist will analyse your settings to suggest changes. For any of Assist’s suggestions, you’ll see a clear explanation and details of how your settings will change. Users with the Set-Up Search permission can click to apply all or some of Assist’s changes.

If your index is included in any active A/B tests, you can automatically propagate the same optimisations to other indices. These changes can also be shared with replicas from within Assist. All of Assist’s changes will be tracked in the audit log for your visibility.

Agent Studio is now generally available, providing a managed platform for building, deploying, and operating AI agents grounded in Algolia data. Customers can configure model providers, connect search and recommendation tools, add safety controls, and monitor conversations through a single API and dashboard. This reduces the complexity of building production-ready AI experiences while providing a consistent, scalable foundation for agent development. Click here to learn more.

Agent Studio now generally supports Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, allowing AI agents to securely connect to external tools and services through a standardized interface. Customers can extend agent capabilities with approved third-party tools while controlling which tools are available and requiring human approval for sensitive actions. This makes it easier to integrate existing systems into AI workflows without building custom integrations. Click here to learn more.

Merchandisers can now create conditionless rules - rules that ‘always apply’ i.e. without a trigger - directly in the Visual Editor. Previously these rules could only be created from the Manual Editor, putting them out of reach for business users. A new Actions menu also lets you create rules unassociated with the current page or query, in the Visual Merchandiser.

DocSearch now has a dedicated DocSearch Hub in the dashboard, bringing DocSearch resources together in one place. Access the Crawler, Ask AI in Agent Studio, indices, API keys, and UI implementation guidance from a single location. This update reduces navigation across multiple dashboard sections and makes it easier to manage and implement DocSearch.

The Visual Editor now supports custom grid layout configurations, letting merchandisers preview results in the same tile pattern used on their storefront. Configure your preferred layout once at the index level patterns like 3-4-3 and see exactly how your products will appear. Reduces guesswork and eliminates the need to validate changes on a separate staging environment.

Rule Tags introduce a flexible categorization system for organizing rules at scale, available in the Algolia dashboard and Merchandising Studio. Tags can be created, edited, and applied to rules individually or in bulk, then used to filter the rules list. Teams managing large rule libraries can now group rules by campaign, owner, or function to improve discoverability and coordinate cleanup.