Marqo: The AI Engine Powering Modern Ecommerce Search and Product Discovery

Ecommerce has evolved dramatically over the past decade, yet most on-site search systems remain anchored in keyword logic and manual merchandising rules. Retailers invest heavily in traffic acquisition, brand building, and customer experience, but the moment that determines conversion often depends on search and product discovery technology that was not designed for today’s shopper behavior.

Modern shoppers do not search with perfect product names. They use natural language, incomplete ideas, style references, contextual needs, and implicit intent. Delivering relevance in this environment requires more than keyword matching or static ranking algorithms. It requires intelligence that understands products, context, and behavior at scale.

Marqo was built to meet that standard.

The Real Problem with Ecommerce Search

For many retailers, search performance quietly limits growth. Irrelevant results reduce engagement. Zero-result queries create friction. Merchandising teams spend time maintaining rules instead of optimizing strategy. Personalization is often shallow or inconsistent.

These challenges are not simply technical limitations. They are revenue constraints. When shoppers cannot easily discover the right products, conversion suffers and customer acquisition investments fail to reach their full return.

Ecommerce discovery is not a generic retrieval problem. It is one of the highest-leverage drivers of revenue performance in digital retail.

What Marqo Does

Marqo is an AI-native ecommerce search and product discovery platform designed to improve conversion rates, increase average order value, and maximize revenue from existing traffic.

It powers on-site search that understands natural language and nuanced intent. It delivers personalized product recommendations across search and browse experiences. It optimizes category and listing page ranking. It automates merchandising decisions that traditionally require ongoing manual effort.

Rather than operating as a static search layer, Marqo functions as a continuously learning system. It improves relevance over time by learning directly from each retailer’s product catalog and from real shopper behavior, including searches, clicks, add-to-cart actions, and purchases.

The outcome is smoother discovery, stronger engagement, and measurable business impact.

The Core Differentiator: Catalog-Trained Intelligence

Many AI-based search platforms rely on shared ranking models applied across multiple retailers. While these systems may incorporate semantic retrieval techniques, they lack deep understanding of the unique structure and nuance of each catalog.

Marqo takes a fundamentally different approach.

For every retailer, Marqo trains a dedicated large language model on that retailer’s product catalog. The system learns the specific attributes, taxonomy, compatibility relationships, brand language, and structural patterns unique to the business.

This catalog-trained intelligence enables more accurate interpretation of vague or complex queries. It allows the system to understand how products relate to one another and how shoppers navigate the assortment. It reduces zero-result searches and surfaces products that align more precisely with intent.

Vector databases provide infrastructure for embedding storage and retrieval. Marqo builds catalog-specific understanding and applies it directly to commerce outcomes.

Designed for Outcomes, Not Infrastructure

Marqo began as a next-generation AI search engine focused on advanced semantic retrieval performance. As adoption grew across industries, it became clear that ecommerce required more than high-quality retrieval. Retailers needed a purpose-built discovery engine designed to drive measurable business results.

Marqo evolved into a complete ecommerce search and product discovery platform, integrating catalog-trained intelligence with behavioral learning and ranking optimization. The focus shifted from providing search components to delivering a unified system that improves conversion and revenue.

Today, Marqo delivers best-in-class ecommerce relevance by combining dedicated large language models per retailer with real-time behavioral optimization. It is engineered not as a generic AI tool, but as a commerce performance platform built to outperform legacy search systems and one-size-fits-all AI solutions.

Continuous Learning and Adaptation

Retail environments are dynamic. Inventory changes. Trends shift. Shopper expectations evolve. A high-performing discovery system must adapt continuously.

Marqo incorporates behavioral signals directly into its optimization loop. As shoppers interact with the catalog, the system refines ranking and recommendations automatically. This creates a discovery engine that compounds performance over time rather than degrading under complexity.

Who Marqo Is Built For

Marqo is designed for mid-market and enterprise ecommerce retailers with large or complex product catalogs and high expectations for search performance.

It is particularly valuable in verticals where nuance and visual context significantly influence purchasing decisions, including fashion, beauty, home, electronics, and specialty retail. In these categories, subtle differences in style, material, or compatibility can dramatically impact what a shopper expects to see.

Retailers adopt Marqo to increase search conversion, strengthen personalization at scale, reduce manual merchandising overhead, and unlock more revenue from existing traffic.

Marqo Cloud

Marqo Cloud was originally introduced as a hosted deployment option for the early search engine. It enabled teams to run Marqo in production without managing their own infrastructure.

As Marqo evolved into a purpose-built ecommerce search and product discovery platform, the strategic focus shifted from infrastructure hosting to advancing catalog-trained intelligence, behavioral learning, and measurable commerce outcomes. Marqo Cloud remains available for existing deployments, while product development and innovation are centered on the core ecommerce discovery platform.

Marqo Today

Marqo delivers best-in-class ecommerce search and product discovery powered by catalog-trained AI. By training a dedicated large language model on each retailer’s catalog and continuously learning from shopper behavior, Marqo achieves a level of relevance and personalization that generic search systems cannot replicate.

Marqo is not an incremental improvement on legacy search. It represents a structural shift in how ecommerce discovery is built and optimized.

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