Creator Assistant Search

No. Creator Assistant Search is an add-on that requires Creator Assistant - Hub to be installed and configured. The Hub provides the OpenAI and Qdrant connections that this plugin relies on.

By default, posts and pages are vectorized and included in search results. If you have Creator Assistant - Hub Pro, you can exclude specific post types from the Content tab in the Hub settings page.

The AI Overview appears when the plugin finds at least one relevant content chunk for the search term. If no relevant content is found in your Qdrant collection, the standard search results are shown without the overview panel.

This usually means your content has not been vectorized yet. Vectorization is handled entirely by Creator Assistant - Hub: new and updated posts are vectorized on save, and existing posts are picked up by the Hub's hourly WP-Cron batch, which requires WP-Cron to be running on your site. See the "How do I check whether the service is properly configured?" question in the Creator Assistant - Hub readme for the Site Health check and WP-Cron troubleshooting steps.

The overview is generated asynchronously via Server-Sent Events: the page loads with the standard search results immediately. The AI answer is then streamed progressively into the panel character by character (typically within a few seconds). If the answer for the same query was already cached, it appears almost instantly.

Yes, and it takes care of it on its own. A search page carrying an AI Overview is marked as not cacheable with the DONOTCACHEPAGE constant, which every major page cache plugin reads. It has to be: the panel embeds a minute-precision access token, and the endpoint that streams the answer rejects a token older than two minutes, so a search page served from a cache would show an empty panel and never load its answer. Search pages without an overview are not affected, and neither is the rest of your site. Most page caches already skip URLs with a query string, which is what a search URL is, so on many setups nothing changes. If your CDN caches HTML by itself, make sure it is not caching search URLs. The answer is cached anyway, separately and server side, so nothing is recomputed for a repeated search.

Yes. The generated answer is cached for one hour using WordPress transients. Repeated searches for the same query within that window return the cached result without any OpenAI API call. Administrators can bypass the cache for a specific search by appending ?creator_assistant_search_no_cache=1 to the search URL (e.g. https://example.com/?s=shoes&creator_assistant_search_no_cache=1). This forces a fresh OpenAI call and overwrites the cached result. The bypass is only available to users with the manage_options capability and has no effect for regular visitors.

No. Creator Assistant Search is entirely non-destructive. It injects the AI Overview panel above search results using standard WordPress hooks (render_block_core/query for block themes, loop_start for classic themes). No theme files are ever touched. Your posts, pages, and all their content remain exactly as they are.

Search queries are never stored in plain text in your database. The plugin uses an anonymous hash of the query as a transient cache key for the AI response. The cached answer expires automatically after one hour and is then deleted. No query logs, no user identifiers, no permanent records. The search term itself is sent to OpenAI to generate the AI answer (subject to OpenAI's privacy policy), but it is not stored persistently by this plugin.

No. The AI Overview is an additional panel displayed above your standard search results. It does not remove, reorder, or replace any of them. If no relevant content is found in your Qdrant collection, the standard results are shown without any panel at all.

Yes, in two ways:

1. Color scheme: go to Appearance → Customize → AI Overview and choose between automatic (follows the visitor's system preference), light, or dark mode. Changes are previewed live in the Customizer.
2. Custom CSS: the panel uses CSS classes prefixed with creator-assistant-search__ai-overview that you can override in your theme stylesheet. The animated border and typed-text effect are provided by Creator Assistant - Hub's shared assets.

Yes, but it has to go in whatever renders your search results page. The panel is built from the site's main search query, so it produces nothing anywhere else. Putting the block or the shortcode in a normal page or in a page template will show nothing at all. First, in Creator Assistant → Search, turn off "Insert the AI Overview automatically in search results". Leaving it on means two sources competing for the same panel: it is still shown at most once per page, but whichever renders first wins, so it may not appear where you placed it. Then place it, depending on your theme:

• Block theme: go to Appearance → Editor → Templates → Search and insert the "AI Overview" block, usually right above the query loop that lists the results. If your theme has no Search template, use its Index template instead.
• Classic theme: add the [creator_assistant_search_ai_overview] shortcode to search.php in your child theme.

Yes. In Creator Assistant → Search you can keep the default prompt, add your own instructions on top of it, or replace it completely. The page always shows the prompt currently in use, including the sections added by add-ons such as Creator Assistant - Search Pro. Adding instructions is usually the better choice: your text is appended to the default prompt, so you keep the improvements shipped with future plugin updates.