Custom Rules: personalize your search engine without writing a line of regex
A rule pack covers the essentials of an industry. It will never guess the exact word your customers type for a product in your own catalog. That's precisely what Custom Rules fill in.
The problem six rule packs don't solve
Heurix currently ships six ready-to-use rule packs — hardware, fashion, industry, books, electronics, wine & spirits. Each automatically recognizes the most common patterns in its sector: a metric diameter, a compound size, a vintage, an ISBN reference. On most catalogs, that covers the essentials right from indexing.
But no pack, however complete, can guess the vocabulary specific to your catalog. A drywall anchor is called an "anchor" by one supplier, a "molly" by another, a "toggle" in some regions. A standardized RAL color code only means something to whoever sells paint or furniture. These are details even a well-designed industry pack can't anticipate for every customer — because they depend on your supplier, your region, your internal naming habits.
Two formats, no regex to write
A Custom Rule is added on top of the rule pack already active on a catalog — it doesn't replace it, and it never touches the rules shared with other Heurix customers. It's specific to a single catalog. Two formats cover the vast majority of real needs:
Keyword → label. Several equivalent words that should all point to the same concept. "Anchor," "molly," "toggle," "drywall anchor" become interchangeable: a customer typing any one of the four finds products containing any of the other three.
Prefix + number → label. A prefix followed by a number, exactly like the hardware pack already does internally for a metric diameter. The prefix "RAL" recognizes both "RAL 9010" and "RAL9010" — with or without a space, however the supplier wrote it in their product file.
A concrete example, start to finish
Take a product indexed under the name "Self-drilling drywall fastener." Without a custom rule, a customer searching "anchor" gets no results — the word appears nowhere on the product listing. After creating a keyword rule with the terms drywall, anchor, molly, toggle, the same search finds the product immediately. The API's response even spells it out in the result details: the product surfaces via the term "drywall," recognized as a synonym of "anchor."
Nothing to publish separately. As soon as the rule is created, every already-indexed product is re-analyzed and the change is live in production.
It works for any industry
The two formats aren't specific to hardware. A cosmetics site can group "organic," "bio," "certified organic" under one concept. A furniture site can recognize a finish code in a letter-plus-number format. A fashion site can unify "stretch," "elastane," "spandex," and "lycra." The logic stays the same — only the vocabulary changes.
The question to ask isn't "do I need a custom pack" — it's "is there a word my customers type that my current pack doesn't recognize yet." If the answer is yes, the answer is probably a Custom Rule, not a weeks-long project.
One limit, to be honest
Patterns that combine two different numeric values into a single label — a diameter and a length together, like "M8x20" — go beyond what these two formats cover. That kind of logic remains possible, but needs a purpose-built pack, available on Scale plans.
How to get started
From the console, under "My catalog," every card now offers a Custom Rules section: a form to pick the format, name the rule, and activate it. No code, no redeployment. Available on every plan, including the free trial.