The September 2026 release introduces the new Advanced Analytics Report Builder, expands search and merchandising configuration options, and improves reliability across Workbench, Autocomplete, indexing, hierarchical facets, Recommendations, and HawkSearch APIs.

Release Highlights

• Advanced Analytics Enhancements – This release introduces the new Report Builder experience and significantly expands Advanced Analytics reporting capabilities:
  • New Reports – Advanced Analytics grows from 8 to 19 reports, with broader data coverage across Search, Landing Pages, Recommendations, and other HawkSearch reporting areas. If you do not currently have Advanced Analytics - talk to your CSD. These additional reports are included at no additional charge.
  • Report Builder – Create custom reports using starter templates or a blank canvas, build and edit reports directly within HawkSearch, manage drafts and published reports, and restore previous report versions. Note that this feature is available through an upgrade - talk to your CSD.
  • Intelligent Insights – Adds the Analytics Assistant, Enhanced Reports with deeper insights, and Report Builder for self-service reporting. Note that this feature is available through an upgrade - talk to your CSD.
  • Connectors – Connect HawkSearch Analytics to BI tools, AI agents and APIs, and bring in CRM, ERP and other business data for a more complete view. Available as an Enterprise add-on – talk to your CSD.
  • Updated Navigation – Access Report Builder alongside existing reporting options through the updated Advanced Analytics navigation.
  • Email Reports – Configure report emails containing reporting-period summaries for metrics such as searches, sales revenue, and orders.
  • Alert Monitoring – Users can now configure Alerts to monitor reports for changes and send an email message or call a webhook endpoint if a threshold is passed.
  • Classic Reports – Existing Classic Reports remain available and can continue to be accessed alongside the new Advanced Analytics experience.
• Rule Builder now supports regular-expression matching for supported conditions and triggers, allowing administrators to account for multiple query or field-value variations with fewer rules. This capability is not enabled by default. Customers interested in using regular expressions in Rule Builder should contact their HawkSearch representative.
• Boosting rules can now influence product ordering within Autocomplete. This capability is available without requiring additional feature enablement.
• Unified Search fallback behavior can now be configured using Keyword Search result count, top-result score, query length, and combinations of conditions. Unified Search and its fallback strategy must be enabled and configured before this functionality takes effect. Customers interested in this capability should contact their HawkSearch representative.
• Hidden facets can now accept selections supplied through a URL or Search API request without being displayed to visitors. Administrators can enable this behavior for an applicable facet using the Filterable When Hidden setting.
• Recommendation Strategies now support additional trigger conditions based on more of the contextual information available when defining recommendation content, providing greater control over when a recommendation widget is displayed.
• OpenSearch item-pinning rules now support the Landing Page is condition. Existing rules using this condition can evaluate correctly, and unsupported Landing Page operators are prevented.
• Visibility Rules can now use supported custom fields supplied through ClientData.Custom, providing additional flexibility for integrations that use client-specific attributes.
• Workbench can now display embedding-generation progress for applicable Concept Search, Visual Search, and PDF Search indexes. These indicators are available only when the corresponding Smart Search capabilities are already enabled for the engine.
• The Tracking API now accepts an optional custom user identifier and event-source information for Assistant activity while maintaining compatibility with existing visitor tracking integrations.
• Instant Engage can now apply a supplied query when filtering trending products. This additive behavior is available without additional feature enablement.

Stability & Performance Updates

• OpenSearch performance has been improved for implementations using large hierarchical facets, reducing processing time and the risk of unresponsive searches.
• Cache invalidation and hierarchy processing have been improved to reduce cases where hierarchy rebuilds could time out, become stuck, or fail to complete.
• Tab facet results and selections now remain consistent when a default item type has not been configured.
• Campaigns using a selected facet value as a trigger no longer cause a Search API error.
• Category Autocomplete now handles partial-query matching more consistently when search terms are not consecutive within a category name.
• Category Autocomplete no longer returns excluded facet selections as positive suggestions.
• Search and Autocomplete API responses now return the configured storefront search URL for standard requests instead of returning a Preview URL.
• Range facets can now be saved when an image is provided through a URL rather than uploaded directly.
• Pressing Enter while editing a facet no longer unexpectedly closes the editor without saving.
• Field and facet exports have been improved to prevent failures affecting certain engines.
• Workbench navigation remains accessible when an engine has a long name, preventing sidebar actions from being obscured or repositioned.
• Synonym exports now use the correct Synonym Group header, allowing exported files to be imported without manually correcting the column name.
• Leading and trailing whitespace is removed from System Parameter values when they are saved, helping prevent invalid paths and related indexing errors.
• Cloned indexes now retain applicable Concept Search, Visual Search, PDF Search, and PDF dimension settings.
• PDF Search items whose unique identifiers contain underscores are now indexed and returned correctly.
• Hierarchy rebuilds handle conflicting field-name casing more safely, preventing duplicate mapping values from producing an error.
• Field API validation has been strengthened to prevent duplicate field names that could interfere with indexing and Preview results.
• Mapping API responses now provide clearer validation feedback when requests contain missing values or invalid sort orders.
• Conflicting Indexing API routes have been corrected so requests to remove attributes from indexed items can be processed successfully.
• 'Stop Further Rules Processing' now takes effect only when the associated rule is triggered. Rules whose conditions are not met will no longer prevent subsequent rules from being evaluated.
• SmartSearch requests now use cached configuration values, reducing unnecessary database activity and improving service reliability.
• Logging for background and non-HTTP operations has been made more resilient, preventing logging failures from disrupting Search API p

Stay up to date with HawkSearch!

Be sure to follow HawkSearch on our social channels to stay up to date on the latest and greatest
news from our team!

Facebook | Twitter/X | LinkedIn

If you have any questions or feedback about this release, please contact us at

[email protected]

Until next time,

The HawkSearch Team