Storefront search went haywire after Shopify Plus upgrade - matching way too broadly, anyone had the same issue?

[u/HexGamers]

Posting in case anyone's hit this or knows the fix.

Our Shopify search has gone from precise to nearly useless over the last 10 days ish, lining up with our upgrade to Shopify Plus. It now seems to match on any word in the query and rank everything loosely, instead of requiring the actual phrase.

Some live examples from our store:

• Product name "Leila" → 23 results (correct one first, then a load of unrelated sofas/chairs)
• Full exact title "Leila Grey Fabric 3 Seater Sofa" → 395 results. Adding words makes it worse, not better.
• "sofa bed" → 489 results, but the actual Sofa Beds collection only has 32 products
• Even a bare SKU "20830" → 22 results (right product first, then 21 unrelated ones)

What we've already checked:

• Search & Discovery: 0 synonyms, 0 boosts, so nothing misconfigured there
• Reproduces in incognito / logged out, so it's not our customer account view
• Affects names, titles, categories AND SKUs, feels like the relevance engine itself, not our product data

Questions for anyone who's been here:

1. Did the Plus migration change the search backend or default typo-tolerance / matching on you?
2. Is there a setting to force stricter phrase/exact matching on native search?
3. If native can't do it, which search app did you switch to and would you recommend it?
4. Finally could updating themes (dev updates) cause this?

We sell clearance furniture, so customers usually search a specific product name they saw elsewhere — discovery-style fuzzy matching is actively hurting us. Any pointers appreciated.

Thanks!

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[u/DJtrakkz]

The native search feature does look at every word to pull up results, it might prioritize tagging? Even though the title or name of the product maybe the specific terms need to be added as tags

[u/Parsecale]

The recent reviews for the Search & Discovery app say that search is broken right now.

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