Boost and Bury Rules for B2C Commerce

Boost and bury rules influence product ranking in search keyword and category results while preserving standard relevance and sorting logic. Use boost and bury rules to promote seasonal or high-margin products, deemphasize products that you don't want to dominate results, and apply targeted merchandising logic for specific search terms or categories.

Boost and bury rules add a merchandising layer on top of standard ranking. The rules adjust product scores before final sorting to promote or deprioritize strategic products without hard overrides.

How Boost and Bury Rules Work

The rule defines the products to target, the context in which the rule applies, and how strongly to adjust the ranking. A boost and bury rule has these components.

Rule definition: Specify the boost or bury behavior, the factor value, and if the rule is active.
- A factor adjustment modifies the ranking, not absolute search position. A product must still be relevant to appear in the search results. Buried products are deprioritized but not removed from the search results.
Targets: Identify which products the rule impacts, using criteria like prodict IDs, attributes, or attribute combinations.
Targets are evaluated independently of search terms and cached to avoid increasing query times.
Qualifiers: Define when the rule applies for a search term or category. Rules without qualifiers apply site-wide.

Boost and Bury Rules and Sort Rules

Boost and bury rules work with the existing sort rules, rather than replace them.

When boost or bury rule is active, it influences ranking by modifying the values of the text_relevance and category_position sort attributes. All other sort attributes remain unchanged. This table describes how boost and bury rules influence the text_relevance and category_position sort attributes.

Sort Attribute	How the Attribute is Adjusted
text_relevance	For search experiences: Boosted products receive a higher relevance score. Buried products receive a lower relevance score. Sorting then proceeds normally by using the adjusted values. This approach lets boosted products to compete fairly based on how relevant the products are to the search term.
category_position	For category experiences, the attribute is modified only when the shopper is viewing a category in these ways: Direct navigation to a category page. Category results reached via search. If the shopper isn't in a category context, the category_position attribute isn't affected. This approach prevents category merchandising rules from unintentionally impacting pure keyword searches. Boosting products without a category position doesn’t push down products that have a category position. Products with a category position are sorted before products that don’t have a category position. A boost rule acts as a tie-breaker only between products that share position value.

Sort Attribute

How the Attribute is Adjusted

text_relevance

For search experiences:

Boosted products receive a higher relevance score.
Buried products receive a lower relevance score.
Sorting then proceeds normally by using the adjusted values.

This approach lets boosted products to compete fairly based on how relevant the products are to the search term.

category_position

For category experiences, the attribute is modified only when the shopper is viewing a category in these ways:

Direct navigation to a category page.
Category results reached via search.

If the shopper isn't in a category context, the category_position attribute isn't affected.

This approach prevents category merchandising rules from unintentionally impacting pure keyword searches.

Boosting products without a category position doesn’t push down products that have a category position. Products with a category position are sorted before products that don’t have a category position. A boost rule acts as a tie-breaker only between products that share position value.

Supported Operators and Data Types

You can use these date types: string, boolean, integer, number, date, and date-time. See Supported Data Types for Search and Sorting Rules. Boost and bury rules support these operators:

Equals
Contains
Is defined
Is not defined
Does not equal
Starts with
Greater than
Less than

If you're using an active data attribute, the rule can't include the contains and start with operators.

Boost and Bury Rule Precedence

If multiple rules apply to a product, the system selects one rule based on scope in this order of precedence.

Search term scope (most specific)
Category scope (subcategories don’t inherit rules from their parent categories)
Site-wide scope (least specific)

If multiple rules of the same specificity match a product, the most recently created rule takes precedence.

Condition Logic

The ANY or ALL conditions affect the results of the targeted products. For example, both of these rules target the category Mens Shoes. The first rule boosts only men’s blue sneakers. The second rule boosts blue sneakers and slip-on sneakers.

Example

Target: Mens | Clothing | Shoes

Rule Name: Boost Blue Sneakers

ALL Conditions:

Attribute: Refinement Color, Operator: Equals, Value: blue

Example

Target: Mens | Clothing | Shoes

Rule Name: Boost Sneakers

ANY Conditions: