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. Learn more about how boost and bury rules work and then prepare your site to create boost and bury rules.
Required Editions
| Available in: B2C Commerce |
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.
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.
How boost and bury rules work
Each rule defines the products to target, the context in which the rule applies, and how strongly to adjust the ranking. Each boost and bury rule has these components.
- Rule definition: Specifies boost or bury behavior, the factor value, and if the
rule is active.
- Factor adjustments modify rankings, not absolute search positions. Products 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.
- Targets are expressed as product-level criteria, like product 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 and bury 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 each sort attribute.
| Sort Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| text_relevance | For search experiences, boost and bury adjusts the text_relevance attribute.
This approach allows boosted products to compete fairly based on how relevant the products are to the search term. |
| category_position | For category experiences, boost and bury adjusts the category_position attribute.
This approach prevents category merchandising rules from unintentionally impacting pure keyword searches. Boosting products without a category position doesn’t push down products that do have a category position. Products with a category position are sorted before products that don’t have a category position. Boost rules act as a tie-breaker only between products that share position value. |
Supported operators and data types
Boost and bury criteria support operators and data types, including string, boolean, integer, number, date, and date-time values. 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
Boost and bury rule precedence
Boost and bury effects don’t stack. If multiple rules apply to a product, the system selects one rule to apply based on scope specificity 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
Conditions are what the rule looks for when targeting products for boost or bury and they support ANY or ALL logic. Consider the example of the rules that target the category Mens Shoes. The first rule boosts only men’s blue sneakers. The second rule boosts blue sneakers or slip-on sneakers.
Target: Mens | Clothing | Shoes
Rule Name: Boost Blue Sneakers
ALL Conditions:
Attribute: Refinement Color, Operator: Equals, Value: blue
Target: Mens | Clothing | Shoes
Rule Name: Boost Sneakers
ANY Conditions:
Attribute: Refinement Color, Operator: Equals, Value: blue
Attribute: Refinement Type, Operator: Equals, Value: slip-on
- Prepare Attributes for Boost and Bury Rules
Prepare your B2C site to create boost and bury rules in Visual Merchandising. - Create Boost and Bury Rules
Create a rule that boosts or buries matching products for a search term, a category, or site-wide context. - Import Boost and Bury Rules
Use search import and export to create, update, or replace boost and bury rules in bulk.
