Every WordPress AI Search Demo I Could Find, and What Came Back

I build Queryra, one of the plugins in this post. That is the reason to be careful about what I claim here, so this post does one thing: it shows what each company's own public demo returned when I typed the same kinds of question into it.

Every search below ran on the vendor's own demo, on the vendor's own catalogue. Nobody is searching anybody else's products. That is what makes the comparison fair, and it is also what makes it limited: a clothing shop and a skincare shop are not the same test, so read this as "what came back", not as a scoreboard.

What I could test, and what I could not

I looked for an official demo, run by the company, where a visitor types their own query. Three plugins have one:

• AI Search has four demo catalogues at wp-search.ai, each with its own search page. I used the clothing shop and the blog.
• Mori AI Search has a demo in the header of its own site, searching its own pages.
• Queryra has demo stores and content sites listed on our showcase page. I used the WooCommerce store and its articles.

Motive Commerce Search has no public live demo. There are product videos and a signup form for a trial, so to evaluate it you install it and connect an account.

I did not test on customer shops. Several vendors link to real stores running their plugin, and those are somebody else's business: queries can cost the owner money, and publishing their results puts a third party in a post they never agreed to.

A note on speed, since it is the first thing people ask: I am not comparing it. Each demo runs on different hosting, a different theme and a different catalogue size, and what a browser reports is the whole page, not the search. Any number I printed would say more about the host than about the plugin.

How I tested

Ten classes of query, fixed before any counted search, then filled in with each catalogue's own words: a brand that catalogue really has, a price band that really divides it, a product type that really exists. One rule for difficulty: the query must not repeat the words of the page it should find, otherwise it stops being a test of understanding. Brand queries are the exception, because there the brand name is the point.

For every query I recorded the first run, including the ones that embarrassed me.

What came back

Where my own plugin fell down

Three of those ten went badly for Queryra, and they are worth more than the seven that went well.

It does not say "nothing". I typed dog food into a skincare shop and got back a hemp seed moisturiser. One result, presented like any other result. The association is not random, because hemp does turn up in dog food, so there is a thread running from the query to the product. The correct answer was still nothing. A shop search that never admits defeat teaches customers to stop trusting it, and both of the other demos answered that query honestly.

The articles lost to the products. dull complexion in the morning is answered by two of the four articles on that demo. Neither appeared. Thirty six results, all products, four pages deep. When I restricted the same search to posts, both articles came back, so the content is there and reachable: in a mixed catalogue the products crowd it out. AI Search avoids this by keeping products and articles in separate demos, which is a product decision I had not appreciated until I saw my own result.

Polish was weaker than Spanish. krem do twarzy means face cream, and the top five held one cream next to a face mist, a facial oil and a face wash. perfumes ricos in Spanish was clean. Same engine, same catalogue, different language, visibly different quality.

One thing I expected to go wrong did not. I thought a bare brand name would be weaker than a brand with a noun, and on this run Dewdrop returned all sixteen of that brand's products.

What the other two showed

AI Search was the strongest of the three at crossing languages. Spanish and Polish both put the right garment first, from queries in other languages. Its blog demo answered a question about sour iced coffee with a post about cold brew, which is exactly the job. Two classes failed outright: a plain intent query returned nothing, and a single missing letter in sneakers returned nothing. Its demo also shows a slider that sets how strict the matching is. I left it at the default. Worth knowing it exists, because it means the behaviour you see can be moved.

Mori is a different shape of product. It answers in prose with source links, rather than returning a list, and the exchange builds like a conversation. It handled a typo, Spanish and Polish without trouble, and when nothing matched it said so plainly. It also, twice, declined to confirm things its own site states: that no developer is needed, and that documents can be uploaded into the results. An answer engine that under-claims its own product is a strange failure, but it is a safer one than confident invention.

So which do you install

If you sell products and your customers type prices, brands and misspellings, the catalogue classes are the ones to weigh, and you should run them yourself on your own category names.

If your site is articles and documentation, test the content question hard, and test it in a catalogue shaped like yours. My own result is the warning: content that is indexed can still be invisible when products sit beside it.

If your visitors ask questions rather than name things, Mori's shape fits that habit, and you should decide whether you want an answer or a list.

If you are comparing to plain keyword search, that is a different question and I wrote about it separately in keyword vs semantic search.

Install, pricing and support are not in this post on purpose. They are in the comparison posts: best AI search plugins for WooCommerce, best for WordPress, and what the fine print says.

Check it yourself

AI Search's demos are driven by the address bar, so every search I ran can be reopened exactly as it was: present for my girlfriend, jumper that isn't itchy, sneakrs, zapatillas blancas, sweter na zimę, dog food and, on their blog, my iced coffee tastes sour.

Queryra's demos are on our showcase page, which also lists a Shopify store, a FAQ and a Wikipedia corpus that I left out of this test to keep the comparison even. One of the sites on that page is not ours: Duhová kočka is a customer's shop, if you want to see the plugin working somewhere nobody set up for a blog post.

Mori's demo opens from the button in the header of its own site.

And if a plugin you are considering has no demo at all, that is information too. It means the only way to evaluate it is to install it.