SearchCue: AI Site Search & Answers

Give your visitors instant, typo-tolerant search, combined with AI answers that are based on only your content. SearchCue takes minutes to install, and since you don’t have to hold the local index in your database, it keeps your backend clean.

Live demo | Pricing | Docs | Privacy policy

What you get

Exceptional search:

• Real-time, typo-tolerant results that appear as visitors type
• Search across pages, PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and other supported documents
• OCR and image understanding that can make image content discoverable when useful text is missing
• Rich WooCommerce product and variation results with prices, sale and stock status, images, tags, and more

Complete answers and not just links:

• Optional cited AI answers generated from your indexed site content, with links to the sources used
• Semantic matching that can find relevant pages even when a query uses different wording

Full control:

• Search lenses for managing what content is searchable in different parts of your website or based on the users language
• Built-in search analytics showing popular terms, clicks, and searches that returned no results
• A hosted design editor for adapting the search interface without changing the plugin or your theme
• Optional automatic reindexing of public pages, posts, or products as you make changes

Works beyond WordPress

The same SearchCue account can also provide search for Webflow, Shopify, Squarespace, and hand-built sites.

Pricing

The plugin is free and GPL-licensed. The hosted service starts with a 15-day free trial, no credit card required. After that, plans start at €9 per month and include an AI answer allowance. You can set a hard monthly AI budget; once it is reached, SearchCue falls back to keyword results at no extra cost. Paying for AI answers beyond the allowance is always optional. See the current SearchCue pricing and plan limits.

External services

SearchCue is a hosted site search and optional cited AI answer service. The plugin makes these external requests:

• Setup and admin analytics: When an administrator submits the connection form, the plugin sends the email address, site URL, WordPress admin return URL, and a random setup state to https://central.searchcue.com. It later exchanges a one-time handoff token there and uses the assigned API key to retrieve site search analytics. The plugin also reports supported integration capabilities. Initial setup reports them immediately; later changes and settings-page connection checks are coalesced through WordPress cron. Failed reports retry in the background, not on every admin request. Analytics and capability requests have two-second transport timeouts.
• Password Protected access: When an administrator opens SearchCue settings with Password Protected installed, the plugin schedules a public IP-list refresh through WordPress cron if the metadata is at least an hour old. Explicit permission and refresh actions fetch the list immediately, with a two-second transport timeout. The endpoint is https://central.searchcue.com/site-search/integrations/wordpress/allowed-ips.json. With automatic permission enabled, hourly WordPress cron also refreshes the list. This request needs no account and sends no content or account credentials. Fetching the list does not grant access without permission. The list includes the public addresses used by SearchCue’s central and crawler nodes, not internal network addresses.
• Automatic content updates: While Automatic updates is enabled, the plugin sends the site hostname, an IndexNow verification key, and changed public URLs to https://central.searchcue.com so SearchCue can refresh the index. The assigned API key authenticates these deliveries to SearchCue. It sends the parent product URL after product or variation changes and the affected post or product URL after taxonomy assignments change. Category and tag edits or deletions capture old and new affected public URLs for up to 100 posts; hierarchical discovery is also limited to taxonomies containing at most 100 terms. Larger sets request broad reconciliation through the home page URL. Unchanged core saves ignore modification timestamps and editor locks; custom-field changes made alongside a save remain eligible. Image changes notify affected public pages and products instead of image files, using upload parents, featured images, WooCommerce galleries, saved content, gallery shortcodes, and synced blocks. Public HTML attachment pages are notified when enabled; unreferenced parentless images without these pages do not trigger updates. Public document attachments keep their direct URLs. Theme-generated references, CSS, options, and plugin-specific fields are outside this standard reference mapping. Changed URLs and image-reference snapshots are stored in non-autoloaded WordPress options. A once-per-minute cron job combines and deduplicates complete URL batches and resolves image references in resumable 50-post chunks, preserving old and new paths. It can process multiple chunks and change batches within a shared 20-second scanning and delivery budget, with at most 5,000 stored post IDs examined per run. New changes arriving during a scan receive a complete pass in a later cron request, without reusing stale post caches. Generated URLs are delivered in the same run when time permits; unacknowledged batches remain queued for retry. Disabling Automatic updates or deactivating the plugin pauses delivery and scanning; deleting the plugin removes queued work and scheduled jobs. Sites with WP-Cron disabled or infrequent traffic need an external cron runner.
• WooCommerce catalogue indexing: SearchCue requests WooCommerce products and visible variations from an authenticated plugin endpoint, with 10 parent products per ordinary page and each parent’s variations kept together. Incremental requests can select a known product family or resolve a public product URL without enumerating the catalogue. The plugin explicitly acknowledges the selection, including confirmed removals. Product, metadata, and term caches are primed in batches to reduce repeated database lookups. The plugin returns names, descriptions, public URLs, product and variation IDs, SKUs, prices and currency, sale and stock status, managed stock quantities and their owning product IDs, backorder policy, categories and tags with their identities and parent relationships, attributes, images, and timestamps. Quantities are exported only when WooCommerce stock management is enabled; unknown, zero, negative, and shared parent quantities remain distinct. This indexed snapshot is not a live checkout inventory or reservation check. Only published, visible catalogue data is returned. The plugin excludes drafts, hidden or password-protected products, orders, customers, and download files.
• GTranslate product translations: For supported server-side, same-origin subdirectory installations, SearchCue requests selected public product text through the site’s existing GTranslate TDN. The authenticated endpoint exposes the active translation configuration and a bounded text-only projection; orders, customers, hidden attributes, and private products are excluded. This uses the site’s existing GTranslate service and does not change global JSON translation settings.
• Blog taxonomy indexing: SearchCue requests the categories and tags of selected published posts from an authenticated plugin endpoint, rather than enumerating every post. The plugin returns public post URLs, post IDs, and the identities, names, and parent relationships of the categories and tags assigned to each selected post, including ancestor categories. Only published, public posts are returned. The plugin excludes post content, drafts, private posts, password-protected posts, and user data.
• Visitor search: After the site is connected, public pages load executable code from https://searchcue.com/search-embed.js. That embed contacts https://central.searchcue.com and https://edge.searchcue.com to load settings, perform searches, and record visitor search terms, originating page paths, whether searches returned results, clicked result paths, and search performance and outcome metrics. If cited answers are enabled, visitor questions and relevant indexed excerpts are sent to SearchCue for cited answer generation.

Admin interface fonts are bundled with the plugin under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and do not make external requests. The font license texts are included with the font files.

Like other web requests, these connections disclose network information such as the requester IP address and browser user agent. SearchCue uses the data to provide, secure, maintain, troubleshoot, and improve the service and to show search analytics to the site administrator. Site administrators are responsible for providing any visitor privacy notices and obtaining any consent required for their site.

Use of the service is governed by the SearchCue Terms and Conditions. Data handling is described in the SearchCue Privacy Policy.

Hosted service disclosure

SearchCue is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product operated by DoNoHarm GmbH. This plugin connects your site to SearchCue, which crawls or receives public content, hosts the search index, and serves visitor searches and optional AI answers. A SearchCue account is required. The plugin does not provide search locally without the hosted service.

By connecting a site, an administrator agrees to the SearchCue terms and acknowledges the privacy policy:

• Service: https://searchcue.com/
• Terms and Conditions: https://searchcue.com/terms/
• Privacy Policy: https://donoharm.world/privacy-policy/searchcue/