Why We Built AACSearch

The Problem We Couldn't Ignore

Running an online store is hard enough without worrying about search. Yet for thousands of merchants using platforms like Bitrix and PrestaShop, that's exactly the situation — the built-in search is mediocre at best, and upgrading it means choosing between two painful options:

Option A: Pay premium prices for a managed search SaaS like managed search providers. It works great, but the bill scales faster than your revenue, and you're locked into a proprietary ecosystem that doesn't speak your CMS's language.

Option B: Self-host AACSearch or traditional search backends. It's powerful and affordable, but you need a DevOps engineer just to keep it running. Index management, schema migrations, hardware provisioning, failover — it's a full-time job before you've written a single line of product logic.

Most merchants pick neither. They live with slow, irrelevant search results and quietly watch conversion rates suffer.

What We Actually Tried First

We didn't set out to build a search product. We were building integrations for a large Bitrix deployment when we ran into this exact wall. We evaluated every option on the market:

• managed search providers: too expensive at scale, no native Bitrix connector
• traditional search backends: too complex to operate for a small team
• AACSearch Cloud: closer, but still required manual schema management and had no CMS-aware sync

We ended up building a custom AACSearch integration — connector, schema management, sync queue, the works. It took three months and required ongoing maintenance. When a second client asked for the same thing in PrestaShop, we realized we'd built something valuable.

The Insight: Search-as-a-Service, CMS-First

The core insight wasn't technical — it was organizational. CMS merchants don't think about "indexes" and "schemas." They think about products, categories, and attributes. A search platform that speaks their language, with native connectors that sync automatically, changes the economics entirely.

So we productized what we'd built:

• Hosted AACSearch under the hood — fast, relevant, open-core
• Native CMS connectors for Bitrix and PrestaShop — plug in, configure, sync
• Automatic schema inference from product catalogs — no DevOps required
• A browser widget you drop onto any page with a single script tag
• A clean dashboard for analytics, synonyms, curations, and API key management

The result: enterprise-grade search that any merchant can deploy in an afternoon.

What Makes AACSearch Different

We've talked to dozens of merchants, developers, and platform agencies. Three things matter most:

1. Time to first result. With AACSearch, a fresh Bitrix store can have full-text product search running in under 30 minutes. That's connector setup, index creation, first full sync, and widget embed. No infrastructure decisions required.

2. Predictable pricing. We price on search units — queries plus indexed documents. A store with 10,000 products and moderate traffic fits comfortably in our free tier. You only pay when your search actually drives volume.

3. CMS-aware sync. When a merchant updates a product price or adds a new variant, AACSearch picks it up automatically. No webhooks to configure manually, no cron jobs to babysit. The connector handles delta syncs every few minutes.

What's Next

We're shipping fast. The core search platform, connector API, and widget are already in production. Coming next: an analytics dashboard that shows you which queries return no results (your biggest conversion opportunity), a knowledge base module for internal Q&A, and deeper integrations with more CMS platforms.

We built AACSearch because we needed it ourselves. We're betting that thousands of merchants need it too.

If you're running a Bitrix or PrestaShop store and search is holding you back — try AACSearch free. No credit card required.