Embeddings handle synonyms and typos, then quietly fail on SKUs, product tiers, and anything private to your store. A long Towards Data Science piece on RAG failure modes explains why, and most of it maps straight onto WooCommerce search.
Clients keep asking for AI product search on stores where the catalog is already a database. Before anyone writes an embedding job, run the plain query and see what it answers. Here is where RAG genuinely fits on a store, and where a filter wins.
The Chatbot Arena ranks language models with one question: which answer is better? The Bradley-Terry model explains how that works, and it maps onto store ranking jobs nicely. I walk through the math, a PHP fit, and the failure modes to expect.
An agent answering store questions is only as good as the definitions underneath it. Before wiring one to a WooCommerce database, know where the numbers actually come from: post tables or HPOS, lookup tables or raw orders, and what revenue even means.
Adding a cross-encoder reranker to store search sounds like the obvious upgrade. The tests I read suggest it rarely beats a better embedding, costs hundreds of milliseconds per query, and only clearly wins when answers sit buried in long text. Filters, synonyms and SKU lookups come first.
A RAG pipeline on WordPress lives or dies on what post_content actually contains. This post covers the three parsing traps behind most retrieval misses, a short function to clean content for indexing, and how to debug failures by tracing queries instead of tuning models.
WooCommerce is closing stale GitHub issues in bulk, so the queue reflects work someone can actually reproduce. This covers where a bug report belongs, why a fresh issue beats reopening an old one, and what the updated contribution rules expect when a tool wrote your patch.
Legal answers “it depends” and code needs yes or no. I take Corné Potgieter’s case for machine-readable compliance and shrink it to WordPress size: the five answers to demand from legal, the hooks core already ships, and a purpose gate you can build on a WooCommerce store this week.
The same cosine similarity and recency weighting that shape social feeds also decide what a store shows its shoppers. I walk through the math, what WooCommerce related products actually do out of the box, and a small cart-aware boost worth shipping on a client site.
The WordPress AI plugin is moving toward encrypted API keys and slowing to a monthly release cadence, both before WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 in July. This is how I’d audit client sites now, and why the Connectors field registry matters for self-hosted models.