Introducing a major update to API tokens that gives your engineering and admin teams precise, "least-privilege" control over API access.

The Challenge: The "All-or-Nothing" API Key

Previously, API tokens (now referred to as Legacy tokens) were company-wide, granting full read and write access to all Constructor endpoints across all your indexes. While powerful, this created potential risks. A leaked token technically, could expose all your data, and a simple misconfiguration in a script could accidentally apply changes to the wrong environment.

The Solution: API tokens with Custom Level of Access

Now, you can build API tokens with a specific, limited scope. When creating a new token, you can define:

• Indexes: Specify which indexes the token can access. This is perfect for isolating your Production, Staging, and Dev environments or managing different websites.
• Scopes: Select which API endpoints the token can use (e.g., searchandising.refined_queries, searchabilities,  synonyms).
• Permission: Define the permission level for those scopes: Read & Write, Read, or Write.
• Expiration Date: Set an optional expiration date. We recommend renewing API tokens regularly.

By limiting access to what is really needed, you reduce security risks if a token gets compromised and rule out the possibility of applying changes to the wrong environment.

Putting API Tokens into Practice

This new control allows you to securely manage complex, multi-team workflows:

• For Integration Scripts: Create an API token that has access only to scopes within the dev_index to test things before applying changes in production.
• For Regional Teams: Give your EU engineering team an API token that can Read & Write to all scopes only on the eu_site index, preventing accidental changes to the US site.

Better Together: API Tokens + Customizable User Roles

This update works hand-in-hand with our recent Customizable User Roles feature. Only users assigned with a role that has Manage API tokens permissions can set up API tokens. Users' ability to create API tokens is limited by their role permissions. An administrator can create tokens for any scope, but a user with a specific role (e.g., "US Merchandiser") can only create API tokens for the indexes and features they are already permitted to access. 

This ensures your permission model is consistent, from the dashboard UI right down to the API.

A Note on Legacy API Tokens

Your existing tokens (now labeled Legacy tokens in the dashboard) will continue to work without interruption. However, you can no longer create new tokens of this type. We highly recommend you audit your existing integrations and begin migrating to the new, more secure API tokens as part of your team's security best practices.

How to Get Started

This feature is now live for all customers. Administrators and users with the appropriate permissions can create new tokens by navigating to Integration > API Tokens in the dashboard.

For a complete, step-by-step guide, please visit our updated documentation: Generate and manage API tokens.

If you have any questions or feedback on the new feature or the Constructor dashboard in general, please connect with your Customer Success Manager or contact us through support@constructor.io.

What's new

You can now target customer-defined user segments across most searchandising rules—not just Boost & Bury. That means you can adjust ranking, recall, content, and slotting for specific audiences (e.g., "US App Users", "Loyalty Tier Gold", "Clicked Meta Ad A") without rebuilding pages or bluntly applying rules to everyone.

You can now

• Apply segments to key rules and surfaces
  • Boost & Bury — Search, Browse, Campaigns, Recommendations, Global
  • Item Slotting (incl. CSV & faceted browse) — Search, Browse, Campaigns, Recommendations
  • Attribute-based Slotting — Search, Browse, Campaigns, Recommendations
  • Allowlist / Blocklist — Search, Browse, Campaigns, Recommendations (Blocklist also on Global)
  • Content Rules — Search, Browse, Campaigns
• Preview as a segment when creating Campaigns: Impersonate a selected segment to see exactly what that audience will experience before you ship.

Why it matters

Previously, segments were available for Boost & Bury only. Teams either ignored insights or applied broad rules to all shoppers, diluting performance. With segments available across your core rule types, you can:

• Tune the same PLP differently per audience (locale, device, lifecycle stage).
• Move faster from marketing signal to on-site personalisation without duplicating pages.
• Protect performance by narrowing rules to only the shoppers they're meant for.

Example workflows

• Campaign continuity: For users who clicked a specific ad or email, slot the exact products that match the message they saw, right on arrival.
• Locale nuance: Slot a colorway or size range for only a particular country/segment without touching other markets.
• Compliance fast-track: Blocklist prohibited items for a single region while keeping them live elsewhere.
• Channel-aware content: Show different banners/copy to app users vs web visitors on the same PLP.

Who benefits

• Merchandisers partnering with Marketing: align landing experiences to campaign promises.
• Region/brand owners: tailor assortment and messaging by locale without forking your catalog.
• Compliance & ops teams: react quickly to region-specific restrictions.

Coming soon

• AI-generated segments
• Segments in Content Rules (Global)
• Segments in Variation Slicing
• Impersonation for Search, Browse, and Global

Learn more

• Configure searchandising rules
• Create a searchandising campaign

To learn more, please contact your Customer Success Manager or support team.

We are excited to announce the general availability of Customizable User Roles with View/Edit permissions. This powerful new capability is now live in the Constructor dashboard for all customers. 

This feature allows enterprise e-commerce companies to provide every member of their team with tailored access, ensuring they have exactly the tools they need to excel—without compromising security or control.

The Challenge: Scaling Operations Securely

As an e-commerce business scales, more teams rely on a central platform for daily tasks. The Merchandising team fine-tunes results across the product discover journey, the Marketing team builds campaign-specific collections, and the Development team manages integrations and indexes. Each team has a unique focus, and providing one-size-fits-all access can create bottlenecks and introduce the risk of accidental changes to critical settings.

The Solution: Granular Control, Tailored for Your Business

Customizable User Roles solve this challenge by providing precise control over what each user can do. This functionality allows you to:

• Safeguard Critical Settings: Protect company-level information, such as API tokens and user management, by restricting access to only designated administrators. 
• Isolate Access by Index: Assign users to specific indexes, making it perfect for managing different regions, websites, or environments (e.g., Staging vs. Production) without overlap. 
• Assign Feature-Specific Permissions: Grant Edit permissions for individual features. Empower your merchandisers to manage Searchandising and Facets while restricting access to A/B Testing or Recommendations for designated roles. 
• Promote Data-Driven Decisions with View-Only Access: Create view-only roles for executives, analysts, and other stakeholders. This allows them to access valuable performance reports and analytics without the ability to make changes. 

Putting Roles into Practice 

With this level of control, you can create highly specific roles that map directly to your operational structure: 

• The Digital Merchandiser (B2B): Gets Edit access to Searchandising, Facets , Collections, A/B Testing, and Global Facet Configuration for the B2B website index, but has View access everywhere else. 
• The Marketing Specialist: Can only Edit the Collections feature to prepare for an upcoming email campaign. 
• The Regional Manager (EU): Has View access to global indexes but can only Edit merchandising rules for the eu_site index. 
• The Developer: Is given Edit access to the staging_index to test a new integration but has only View access to the production environment.

How to Get Started

This feature is now available in your dashboard. Administrators can begin creating and assigning roles today by clicking on their name in the bottom left corner, then Team Members, then switch to the User Roles tab. For a detailed walkthrough on creating roles and assigning permissions, please visit our documentation guide.

If you have any questions or feedback on the new feature or the Constructor dashboard in general, please connect with your Customer Success Manager or contact us through support@constructor.io.

We’re excited to introduce the Continuous Optimization Report in your Constructor dashboard. This report gives you full visibility into how Constructor’s tailored Continuous Optimization Plan drives measurable revenue impact for your business.

💡 What is the benefit?

Constructor has always taken a unique approach to delivering value – not through one-size-fits-all algorithms, but by tailoring search and discovery variants to each customer’s goals and shopper behavior. Until now, these results were shared mainly in your touchpoints with our Customer Success and Data Science teams. With the Continuous Optimization Report, you can now track how experiments are generating value to your business directly in your dashboard, ensuring transparency and confidence in the ROI Constructor delivers.

📍 Where to find it?

You can access the Continuous Optimization Report in your dashboard by selecting Optimization from the side menu. There you’ll see the combined annualized revenue lift from completed experiments, a list of experiments with details like revenue lift, annualized projections, and important context about each experiment's hypothesis. Click any experiment to see its setup, metrics, and outcomes – all in one place!

If you have any questions or feedback on the updated feature, please connect with your Customer Success Manager or contact us through support@constructor.io.

Constructor now supports Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) for category hierarchies—making it easier to model real-world structures where a single category belongs to multiple sections.

Instead of duplicating categories like “Wireless Headphones” to appear in both "Electronics" and "Gifts," you can now assign multiple parent paths and control which one is shown based on where the shopper is navigating from.

Benefits include:

• Cleaner catalog setup with no duplication of categories
• Flexible hierarchy modeling that reflects real-world relationships
• Better navigation control using query-time path selection

This enhancement also introduces a new groups_path parameter that lets you specify which path to render during browse requests. This results in more precise breadcrumbs and a better contextual experience for shoppers.

🔧 Example Use Case
 A single category, like Wireless Headphones, can appear under:

• Electronics > Audio > Headphones > Wireless Headphones
• Gifts > Tech Gifts > Audio > Wireless Headphones

If no groups_path is passed during a browse request, Constructor automatically uses the first parent path ingested for that category - so you’re always covered by default.

How to Structure Parent Categories

To incorporate multiple parent categories, you’ll need to update your catalog format:

✅ Do this:

• Replace parent_id: "xyz" → with parent_ids: ["xyz"]
• For multiple parents: parent_ids: ["xyz", "abc"]

⚠️ Important:

• Only include parent_ids - do not include both parent_id and parent_ids
• Even a single parent must be wrapped in an array
• Ensure all parent categories are defined before ingestion

• You can send catalogs with multiple parents in either:

  • CSV format via item_groups.csv
  • JSON format via the /v2/item_groups endpoint

You decide which path to show based on the user’s journey - with full validation and fallback behavior built in.

DAG-based category hierarchies are already available in production to all our customers. 

Related docs: Retrieve item groups, Create or replace item groups, Update item groups, Retrieve item group, JSON / JSONL feed format - item groups (categories), CSV feed format - item groups (categories) 

We're beyond excited to unveil a powerful new capability in the Constructor dashboard: Customizable User Roles with View/Edit permissions, now available in beta!

With this release, companies can tailor access like never before. Empower your teams with precisely the tools they need, whether it's managing indexes, merchandising, or launching A/B tests. It's flexible, secure, and built to scale with your company.

Why this matters

Companies tend to have multiple teams working within the Constructor dashboard. From Merchant Teams responsible for all things merchandising, Marketing Teams that use Collections for email campaigns, and Dev Teams in charge of integrations, every group uses the dashboard differently. With Customizable User Roles, you can assign access and permissions that align with each team's responsibilities without compromising control or security.

What you can do

With this release, you can now create custom roles that:

• Control access to company-level settings, such as API tokens and user management
• Allow access to specific indexes (perfect for teams that manage different regions or websites!)
• Grant edit access to individual features, such as Searchandising, Global Facet Configuration, Recommendations, and more.

You can even create a view-only role to invite more stakeholders from different departments who might benefit from the information in the Constructor dashboard, such as reporting and analytics. 

How to get started

All roles start with view-only access permission across all indexes. From there, you can assign edit access to any index and specific features within those indexes. This can be done via the Constructor dashboard. 

For more information, please visit the documentation guide.

With custom user roles, your teams will benefit from tools and information available in the Constructor dashboard without the risk of accidental actions.

We are currently rolling out Customizable User Roles with View/Edit permissions in beta. Please, connect with your Customer Success Manager or contact us through support@constructor.io to get early access.

What’s new:

We’ve upgraded Variation Slicing to give merchandisers more precision than ever.

With the new Variation Slicing Conditions, you can choose exactly which product variations to surface — without slicing all possible variants for every item.

You can now:

• Highlight only the variations you want — e.g., new styles, sale items, or seasonal colors.
• Filter variations with powerful conditions such as Item ID, color, size, or other attributes.
• Mix and match conditions to target exactly the right subset of product variations.
• Visually merchandise your PLPs by promoting only the variations that matter for your campaign.
• Use a drag-and-drop preview to instantly tailor the shopper experience.

Why it matters:

Before, merchandisers had to make a tough choice:

• Slice all variations for an attribute (risking cluttered or irrelevant product listings), or
• Avoid variation slicing altogether — missing opportunities to spotlight specific variations.

Now, you can surgically control variation visibility to align perfectly with your strategy.

 For example:

• Launch a PLP for Valentine’s Day featuring only red dresses.
• Promote only the 12-pack size of a soft drink that’s on sale.
• Push new color drops for a top-selling shoe to the top of the page.

This means more relevant merchandising, more engaging shopping experiences, and more revenue potential — without sacrificing the integrity of your PLP layout.

Learn more in the documentation.

At Constructor, we recognise the importance of data to inform merchandising decisions and track business performance, and we continue to enhance analytics capabilities, so that find the right would become more intuitive without leaving the dashboard. That's why we are excited to introduce grouping analytics by index. 

What’s new

You can now select more than one index in the dashboard’s analytics view to see combined performance metrics. This could be especially helpful in cases like:

• Analysing a specific region, where each index could represent a specific country (e.g., exploring performance of all indexes from EMEA)
• Getting insights on specific languages for the same regional market (e.g., Germany–German and Germany–English)
• Any custom grouping based on your operational structure, warehouses or team ownership

Multi-index support is available in various sections within Analytics, namely:

• Homepage
• Search
• Browse
• Recommendations
• Opportunities
• Item Analytics

Note: exporting for multi-index analytics will be supported separately in upcoming releases.

Why it matters

Previously, you could either:

• View analytics for all indexes combined, or
• Drill into a single index at a time

With this update, we’ve made it easier for merchandisers to analyse performance across multiple indexes at once — no more exporting and stitching reports together manually. That means less extra work for teams needing to analyse subsets of indexes. Now, you can group just the indexes you care about and instantly see combined insights, making reporting faster and decision‑making more precise.

Questions or feedback? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager or contact us at support@constructor.io.

What’s new:

We’ve upgraded Searchandizing Campaigns to work across multiple indexes — so you can manage cross-country and cross-environment merchandising in one place.

Now you can:

• Create once, publish everywhere — apply a single set of searchandizing rules to multiple countries, languages, or environments at the same time.
• Save hours by skipping manual copy-paste between indexes.
• Keep campaigns consistent across global markets or between dev/prod environments.
• Easily scale your strategy for regional launches, seasonal campaigns, or cross-country promotions.
• Validate faster — see the end-to-end shopper experience across all markets in just a few clicks.

Why it matters:

Before, cross-country merchandising was a time-consuming, error-prone process:

• Merchandisers had to duplicate configurations for each index manually.
• Testing and validation meant jumping between indexes one by one.
• Rule conflicts often appeared during copying — slowing launches.
• Keeping strategies aligned globally was tricky and sometimes led to outdated or inconsistent shopper experiences.

Now, Cross-index Searchandizing Campaigns make it possible to:

• Launch a new product or marketing push across all markets instantly.
• Keep branding and merchandising strategies consistent worldwide.
• Respond to market changes or promotions at global speed.

Whether you’re boosting new arrivals in all EMEA markets, aligning a seasonal campaign across APAC and North America, or syncing dev and production environments, you can now do it all from one campaign.

Learn more in the documentation.

What’s new:

Collections have finally made their way into the Workspace → Searchandizing dashboard.

You can now searchandize Collections with the same powerful tools and smooth UX you already know from Search Queries and Browse Categories.

Here’s what you can do:

• Easily find the right Collection with filters for last updated user email, rule types (Boost, Slot, Content, etc.), and attached user segments.
• Track who last updated rules — see exactly who and when changes were made.
• Create rules where you expect to — add new searchandizing rules for Collections directly from Workspace → Searchandizing.
• Copy rules with ease — move searchandizing rules between the same Collection ID across multiple indexes.
• Enjoy all the UX enhancements you’ve already experienced for Search and Browse.

Why it matters:

Before this update, merchandisers had to jump through hoops to manage Collections:

• It was tricky to find the right Collection to work on.
• Past updates weren’t always easy to trace.
• Adding rules meant leaving your expected workspace.

Now, Collections searchandizing is faster, more transparent, and exactly where you need it. You’ll spend less time hunting for configurations and more time creating the perfect shopping experience for your customers.

Available now for all customers subscribed to the Collections product.