AI Search for Magento Stores: Semantic Embeddings vs Keyword Matching
Three search stacks were wired into the same Magento 2.4.9 + Hyvä storefront over a 50k-SKU catalog, and the results were not what the vendor decks promise. OpenSearch k-NN with OpenAI text-embedding-3-small ran at ~$0.02 per million tokens and held query latency under 120 ms; Algolia shipped in a weekend but billed $0.50 per thousand searches at scale; Coveo nailed precision but cost north of $20k a year. The article walks through each stack with real config, the embedding-model trade-off, and the 60/40 hybrid score blend that beats all three on the queries customers actually type.