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.

Add-ons

🌐 Loupe Cross-Site Search — Search across every site in a WordPress multisite network from a single hub. Mirrors each site’s public content into one combined index and ships a ready-to-use Cross-Site Search block with site and post-type facets, sorting, and highlighted snippets. Requires WordPress multisite 6.9+ and Loupe Search active on the network.

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.

loupe_search_db_path

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

loupe_search_post_types

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

loupe_search_posts_per_page

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

loupe_search_index_protected

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

loupe_search_field_{$field_name}

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

loupe_search_schema_{$post_type}

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

loupe_search_is_safely_sortable_{$post_type}

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

loupe_search_is_safely_sortable_meta_{$post_type}

Overrides whether a custom field may be used for sorting.

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