SmartMatch Search

Default WordPress search only matches keywords. If the words a visitor types don't literally appear in a post, they get "nothing found", even when your site has exactly the right page. SmartMatch Search looks at what the visitor means instead. It puts the best matching page at the top of the normal search results, marked as the best match. Visitors can search the way they talk:

• "page where I can find my orders" finds your Order history page.
• "how do I get my money back" finds your Returns & refunds policy.
• "wo finde ich meine rechnung" (German) finds your English Invoices page. Visitors can search in their own language.
• "cancel my subscription" finds Manage your membership, not every post that happens to contain the word "cancel".

It also leaves out results that only share a word with the query: a post isn't suggested just because the search term shows up in it somewhere. Your search only gets better The normal search results stay where they are. SmartMatch Search only adds a suggestion above them. If nothing relevant is found, or the AI is unavailable, visitors see the normal results as before. When the normal search finds nothing, the suggestion becomes the result, so visitors don't hit an empty page. It works with your existing search form and theme, both classic and block themes. You don't need a new template or shortcode. Only real visitors, so you only pay for real searches Every AI search costs you a small amount at your AI provider, so you want to spend that on people, not bots. This is why SmartMatch Search works together with Burst Statistics. Burst already filters bots, crawlers and spam out of your visits. SmartMatch Search only uses the AI for visits Burst has counted as human. Bots get the normal search results and cost you nothing. Logged-in users always get the AI search, even without a Burst visit, for example when Burst doesn't track their user role. A logged-in user is never a bot. Costs are also limited by:

• A daily budget: a maximum number of AI searches per day (default 50). When it's used up, visitors get the normal search results until midnight.
• Caching: the same search is answered from cache and costs nothing extra.
• A rate limit per visitor, which stops one person from using up your budget.

See what visitors are looking for Searches show up in the Engagement tab of your Burst dashboard. You see what visitors search for, and where your content doesn't answer their questions yet.

1. Install and activate the AI plugin and connect an AI provider in its settings.
2. Install and activate Burst Statistics (free) or Burst Pro.
3. Install and activate SmartMatch Search.

That's it. Your search now shows a best match for human visitors and logged-in users. You can adjust the settings under Statistics → Settings → SmartMatch Search.

1.0.1

• September 8th, 2026
• Fix: pages are always part of the candidate set instead of being pushed out by more recently updated posts.
• Improvement: each candidate now includes its URL path, so navigational queries (e.g. "invoice" for /account/invoices/) match pages whose title and excerpt do not mention the term.
• Fix: the provider is asked for schema-enforced JSON output, so the model can no longer answer in prose; plain-text fallback for models without output-schema support.
• Fix: the response parser tolerates prose around the answer and object-shaped responses, and logs provider errors explicitly.
• Improvement: default number of posts sent to the AI raised from 200 to 500.

1.0.0

• July 9th, 2026
• New: Initial release.