Admin friendly

Under “iO Smart Search” in the WordPress Settings menu you configure everything the plugin does, without touching code. The page is organised in logical sections that mirror the search pipeline: what gets indexed, how it is ranked, how AI is used and how the UI behaves on the front‑end.

In the indexing section you choose which post types and statuses are included, and which fields should be indexed (title, content, excerpt and optional meta keys). You can also decide whether the plugin should override the classic WordPress search on the front‑end and how many results per page should be returned when the override is active. A separate Index status box shows which backend is used (MySQL or Qdrant), when the last full reindex started and finished, how many posts were processed and any recent error message. From here you can also trigger a full Reindex all content job, protected by capability checks and nonces.

The ranking section lets you tune how the hybrid search behaves. You can set a minimum semantic score threshold to filter out weak matches and control the balance between keyword and semantic relevance with a single slider. Content authority levels are defined as reusable profiles with a key, label and weight multiplier (for example “official”, “normal”, “opinion”), and these are then applied per post via a metabox. There is also a synonyms/aliases area where you can enter simple rules such as SUV => XC90, XC60 to expand queries before they hit the keyword and semantic layers.

The AI & fuzzy search section covers summaries, providers and autosuggest. You can enable AI‑generated summaries of search results, edit the system prompt, set a custom summary title and disclaimer, and choose which provider to use for summaries (OpenAI or Bonzai) with optional fallback to the other if the primary fails. Separate fields hold API keys and model names per provider, and there are “Test connection” buttons that perform a small live request and show inline feedback if the keys or endpoints are misconfigured. Fuzzy search and autosuggest are controlled here as well: you can switch autosuggest on or off, define how many suggestions should be returned and how many characters a user must type before suggestions appear.

Finally, the presentation & debug section lets you decide how much information should be visible to editors and developers. You can toggle whether the content type label (e.g. “(Page)”) should be appended to titles in search results, and whether detailed debug information should be rendered for logged‑in admins: global max score, per‑result scores, authority weights, and which provider/model produced the embeddings and summaries. Together these controls make the administration page the single place where you shape both the behaviour and observability of iO Smart Search.