Loupe Search

Loupe Search improves WordPress core search by maintaining its own index for fast lookups, supporting typo tolerance, phrase matching, basic exclusion operators, and per–post-type customization.

Core Features

• 🚀 Index-backed search engine replacing the WordPress default
• ⚡ Results served from a dedicated index, not the posts table
• 🔄 Real-time index synchronization
• 🌐 Support for multiple languages
• 📦 Full custom post type integration
• 📈 Integrated search performance metrics
• ✅ Works with the WordPress default themes

Search Capabilities

• 🔍 Typo-tolerant searching – find results even with misspellings
• 💬 Phrase matching with quotation marks: "exact phrase"
• ➖ Exclusion operator support (e.g., term -excluded)
• 🔀 OR search: term1 term2 finds content with either term
• 📖 Pagination support
• Stemming support
• Stop words recognition
• Highlighting and cropped snippets via the REST API

Administration

• Simple settings interface
• Post type selection
• Field configuration options
• One-click reindexing
• Processing time monitoring

Developer Features

• 🛠️ Extensive filter system for customization
• 📊 Performance monitoring and diagnostics
• 🔧 Customizable indexing
• Field weighting control

See the Search API documentation for REST endpoint details.

AI Agent Integration (WordPress Abilities API)

Loupe Search registers two abilities via the WordPress Abilities API (WordPress 6.9+) so AI agents and automation tools can discover and use search functionality natively:

• loupe-search/search — Typo-tolerant full-text search across indexed post types. Supports phrase matching, exclusion, and OR operators. Publicly accessible.
• loupe-search/get-post — Retrieve a single published post by ID. Publicly accessible.

These abilities are discoverable through the standard WordPress Abilities registry and require no additional configuration. As of 1.2.0 the ability namespace is loupe-search; the legacy wp-loupe/search and wp-loupe/get-post abilities still work but are deprecated aliases.

Upgrading from the experimental MCP server? The MCP server, token service, and WP-CLI token commands were removed in 0.8.5. Use the Abilities API endpoints described above instead; no configuration migration is required.

Filters

These filters allow developers to customize Loupe Search's behavior. As of 1.1.0 they use the loupe_search_* prefix; the old wp_loupe_* names still work but are deprecated and will be removed in a future major release.

Controls where the search index is stored. Default: WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/loupe-search-db'

Modifies which post types are included in search. Default: the post types selected on the settings screen, falling back to ['post', 'page']

Controls search results per page. Default: WordPress "Blog pages show at most" setting

Controls indexing of password-protected posts. Receives false for protected posts and true for everything else; return true to index them anyway.

Modifies a core post field before indexing. Does not fire for custom fields. Example: The plugin uses loupe_search_field_post_content to strip HTML tags from content

Customizes the schema for a post type: which fields are indexed, their weight, and whether they are filterable or sortable.

Overrides whether a core post field may be used for sorting.

Overrides whether a custom field may be used for sorting.

For signatures, defaults, and usage examples, see the filter documentation.