What’s New in AI Search 1.27-1.28: Exact Matches and Tiered Results

Two releases shipped this month, and together they change how AI Search ranks every result. Here is what is new in 1.27 and 1.28, and why the changes matter for your store.

Exact SKU and title matches always come first (1.27)

Random-looking codes like Amazon ASINs mean nothing to an AI model, so a shopper pasting a SKU used to get poor results – the exact product they named could score below the similarity threshold. Now the plugin checks the query against product SKUs (exact and prefix, with variation SKUs resolving to their parent product) and exact titles before any AI work, and pins matches to the top with a green “Exact Match” badge for editors. Always on, no setting. Developers can add their own rules – EAN, supplier references – through the new ai_search_exact_matches filter.

Bulk indexing tells you what failed, and why (1.27)

Embedding generation used to fail silently – connection fine, nothing indexed, no explanation. The Generate Embeddings screen now reports exactly what happened: how many items succeeded, how many failed, and the cause per group – connection errors, rejected token, exhausted quota, empty content. Provider-level errors stop the run early instead of burning your whole batch on a repeating failure.

Traditional results are never lost (1.28)

The biggest change of the year. Results now come in three strict tiers: exact matches first, then every keyword match your traditional search would find – reordered by relevance instead of publish date – and only then AI results, appended below. Installing AI Search can no longer make any search worse: if a product literally matches the query, it shows, in a better position than default WordPress would give it. We wrote up the full reasoning in AI Search vs the default WordPress search, and you can try the tiers yourself in the live demo.

Smaller fixes worth knowing

Site-wide searches (no post type specified) previously skipped AI ranking entirely due to a post-type resolution bug – fixed. WooCommerce catalog visibility is now respected everywhere, so products hidden from search stay hidden in every tier. Result counts shown by themes now match what the plugin actually returns. And 1.28.1 fixed tier treatment for secondary queries, so blocks and widgets that run their own search get the same ranking as the main one.

Update or install AI Search on WordPress.org – the free tier covers 10,000 embeddings, no API key required.

Published August 2026. Full changelogs on the plugin page.