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Marqo vs Marqo Classic

Marqo offers two distinct products. If you're evaluating Marqo or starting a new integration, Marqo is the current product — Marqo Classic is deprecated and no longer recommended for new projects.

Marqo​

Marqo is a search and product discovery platform built specifically for ecommerce. At its core, it replaces your site's search bar and category/browse pages with an AI-driven system that learns from your shoppers' behavior — clicks, purchases, add-to-carts — to surface the most relevant and highest-converting products for any given query or browsing context.

  • LLM-based relevance and conversion optimization. Marqo explicitly optimizes for business outcomes — it ranks products to maximize revenue, conversion, and margin, not just to return "correct" results.
  • Per-customer embedding model finetuning. Uniquely, Marqo finetunes its embedding models on a per-customer basis using each retailer's own clickstream and purchase data. This means the semantic understanding of your catalog is trained on your shoppers' behavior, not a generic shared model — a capability no other ecommerce search provider offers, and one that directly drives conversion rate improvements.
  • Behavioral learning. It continuously trains on your store's own clickstream and purchase data, so rankings improve over time without manual tuning.
  • Full discovery suite. Beyond search, it covers autocomplete/typeahead, browse/category pages, recommendations, and collections — all driven by the same underlying AI.
  • Merchandising controls. Merchandisers can layer business rules on top (boosts, buries, pins, slots, filters) to handle promotions, margin goals, clearance, and more.
  • Guaranteed uplift. Marqo offers customers the ability to run controlled A/B tests to directly measure the revenue and conversion impact. You can prove the business case before full commitment — and Marqo stands behind the results.
  • Enterprise-focused. Marqo targets mid-market to large enterprise retailers, and is often brought in to replace legacy tools like Solr/Elasticsearch-based search or older platforms like Searchspring, Klevu, or home-built solutions.

Marqo Classic​

Marqo Classic is the original open-source vector search engine. It is a general-purpose neural search library that lets developers index and search multimodal data (text, images) using embedding models. While powerful for general vector search use cases, it is not purpose-built for ecommerce product discovery and lacks the behavioral learning, conversion optimization, and merchandising capabilities of Marqo.

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Marqo Classic is no longer under active development. Existing users are encouraged to migrate to Marqo. New projects should use Marqo.