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The study examined the financial impact of deploying Algolia’s AI search and retrieval platform and found that organizations can achieve a 213% return on investment over three years, with a payback period of less than six months.

Forrester also reported a net present value (NPV) of $3.1 million over three years, driven by improved search relevance, automated merchandising, and meaningful revenue and efficiency gains across digital commerce teams.

John Stewart, VP Corporate Communications and Brand at Algolia, said: “After the investment in Algolia, the interviewees’ fast, accurate, and flexible search and discovery enables rich product indexing, AI-powered merchandising, and personalized recommendations—resulting in higher conversions, improved customer experience, and reduced operational and development effort across teams.” 

The TEI study drew on interviews with four B2C enterprises experienced in using Algolia. Their feedback was aggregated into a composite ecommerce organization with $600 million in annual revenue and more than 600 million searches per year. Before adopting Algolia, these organizations relied on internally developed or legacy, platform-bundled search solutions that exhibited limitations in relevance accuracy, scalability, and support for complex product catalogs, while also requiring significant ongoing manual maintenance.

Stewart noted: “Retailers are being asked to move faster, adapt constantly, and do more with less when prices are hitting record-highs and brand loyalty is down. There’s a common assumption that unlocking growth requires a full reset of merchandising strategy. This study shows the opposite. With Algolia, teams were able to build on what they already had, while doubling ROI and seeing payback in a matter of months. The right search and retrieval engine doesn’t just support the business. It strengthens it.”

According to the study, Algolia addressed this challenge with an API-first AI search and retrieval platform designed for precision and flexibility. Features such as typo tolerance, dynamic ranking, and rich indexing enabled faster, more accurate product discovery, while giving teams greater control over their AI merchandising strategies and customer experiences.

A product manager at a home improvement ecommerce retailer, who participated in the study, set out to measure whether Algolia could improve key performance metrics such as click-through rate (CTR) and add-to-cart activity. To do so, his team ran an A/B test comparing Algolia with their previous search engine. “After implementing Algolia for about three to four months, the results were clear: CTR increased by nearly 11%, and customers were adding more items to their carts. The improved search experience drove more visitors to product detail pages, and those visitors converted at a higher rate than before.”  Overall, the test confirmed that Algolia significantly enhanced the search journey and boosted engagement.”

As a result, Algolia helped drive measurable revenue growth and operational efficiencies across marketing, merchandising, sales, customer service, and development teams. Additional measurable benefits of Algolia’s platform identified in the Forrester TEI study include:

• $12 million in annual revenue growth driven by improved search relevance, discovery, and merchandising

• Up to 35% time savings for merchandising teams, worth more than $1.8 million over three years

• 23% time savings for marketing teams and 12% for sales teams

• Redeployment of 1.5 developer FTEs to higher-value initiatives

• Improved engagement, including an 11% increase in click-through rate and higher add-to-cart rates

Stewart added: “Forrester paints a clear picture of the quantitative benefits of the Algolia platform, but they also surfaced something just as important. Algolia gives teams confidence. The confidence to make changes in real time, to launch faster, and to scale globally without added complexity. Ease of use and scalability aren’t features for us, they’re principles. And it’s why over 18,000 businesses trust Algolia every day.”  

This collaboration builds on Algolia’s proven search and retrieval capabilities, extending them into LLM-driven experiences that amplify the revenue, efficiency, and ROI highlighted in the Forrester study.

To download the full Total Economic Impact™ study, Forrester TEI To learn how Algolia’s AI Search and Retrieval platform can help your business drive revenue, efficiency, and conversion.

About Algolia
Algolia is the leading AI Search and Retrieval platform, powering 1.75 trillion searches a year for more than 18,000 businesses. With a unified keyword and vector search and retrieval engine, Algolia delivers the world’s fastest and most scalable search and discovery technology. Companies rely on Algolia to build agentic, generative, and search experiences through tools like Agent Studio. With over a decade of innovation, Algolia is redefining retrieval-powered applications and the future of AI discovery.