Shutterstock (Envato) Unlocks $12M in Incremental Revenue with Marqo’s AI-native Search
Company Overview
Shutterstock is a leading global creative platform offering high-quality licensed images, videos, music, and editorial assets to businesses, marketing teams, and content creators. With a catalog of over 600 million assets and a contributor community spanning more than 150 countries, Shutterstock serves millions of users worldwide through its marketplace, API integrations, and enterprise services.
The company’s search experience is mission-critical — acting as the first and most frequent interaction point for customers sourcing creative assets for their campaigns, products, and editorial projects.
Challenge
With an ever-expanding content library and a highly diverse global customer base, Shutterstock’s legacy keyword-based search system faced several limitations:
Difficulty handling conceptual or abstract queries
hopeful resiliencemodern minimalist business backgroundLimited understanding of artistic style, mood, or conceptual themes
High abandonment rates for vague, typo-prone, or exploratory searches
Inconsistent performance on mobile, where many B2B and enterprise users begin creative searches
Shutterstock needed a more intelligent, intuitive search solution that could better interpret user intent, recommend relevant alternatives, and increase overall marketplace engagement and conversion.
Solution
In 2023, Shutterstock partnered with Marqo, an AI-native vector search engine built for product and content discovery. In a seamless implementation:
Marqo’s vector search replaced Shutterstock’s keyword-based system across the website and API endpoints.
AI-powered semantic search allowed users to find relevant assets based on meaning, style, and concept — not just exact word matches.
Marqo trained on Shutterstock’s rich metadata, user behavior patterns, and image attribute tags to improve personalization and result relevance.
Vector embeddings captured mood, visual themes, and artistic style, improving discovery for ambiguous or abstract queries.
Results
Following a controlled A/B test over a 6-week period covering 15% of search traffic, Shutterstock observed measurable improvements in key business metrics:
$12M↑
$12M in incremental revenue driven by increased asset purchases and licensing transactions
28%+
28% improvement in add-to-cart rate for conceptual and stylistic queries
3.1%↑
3.1% increase in average transaction value, as users discovered and licensed higher-value asset bundles and extended licenses
Significant reduction in search latency
Improving mobile search experiences and reducing bounce rates
What This Means
For a content-driven marketplace like Shutterstock, every improvement in search relevance and performance directly translates to revenue and customer loyalty.
With Marqo, Shutterstock transformed its search experience from a keyword-dependent system to an intuitive, meaning-driven discovery engine.
The result:
More exploratory searches converted into transactions
Users licensed higher-value content and bundles
Mobile engagement improved with faster, smarter search
And over $12M in incremental revenue unlocked — all with a swift deployment, minimal engineering overhead, and no manual asset curation.
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