Searchlight
The SEO and content half of Commerce OS, shipped as its own Shopify app. Search Console ingest, content-decay detection with an AI refresh draft, technical audit, internal linking, and catalogue SEO writes - on the same runtime as the suite, asking for 16 permissions instead of 23.
The public App Store listing is not linked here yet, so installs are provisioned by hand. We would rather say that than point a button at a listing you cannot reach.
Because an SEO tool should not need your customer list.
Installing the full suite means granting all 23 scopes it uses across attribution, messaging and ad orchestration. If what you want is search and content, that is a bad trade - so Searchlight requests 16, and each one is annotated in the app manifest with the module that needs it.
- Customers
Searchlight never reads your customer records. Segmentation, lifecycle and messaging all live in the suite.
- Discounts + price rules
No discount creation, no price-rule writes. Nothing in Searchlight can change what a shopper pays.
- Marketing events
No campaign objects written into your Shopify marketing surface.
- Fulfilment + shipping
Read-only order data is used for revenue signals; fulfilment is out of scope entirely.
- Themes
No theme edits. Content publishes through the content APIs, not by rewriting your storefront templates.
A scope you never grant cannot leak. The strongest control over customer data is not encrypting it well - it is not holding it. Searchlight has no path to your customer records because it never asks for one.
Fewer scopes, shorter review. Narrow permission sets clear internal security review faster, which matters when the person who wants the SEO tool is not the person who approves app installs.
Nothing in it can move money. No discount writes, no price rules, no ad-platform bids. The worst case for a misconfigured Searchlight automation is a content change you can reverse, and every action writes an audit row with an undo path.
5 hubs, gated at the runtime.
Searchlight is not the suite with menu items hidden - the edition boundary is enforced in the runtime, so routes outside these hubs are not reachable. What you see is what the app is.
Daily Ops
The morning surface. Revenue leaks, out-of-stock signals, and what changed since yesterday - so the first ten minutes of the day are a read, not a hunt.
Products
Listing creation and bulk generation, collections, inventory signals, and SEO metafield writes (title, description, structured data) straight into your catalogue.
Search & SEO
Search Console ingest, rank and query tracking, content-decay detection with an AI refresh draft, crawl and technical audit, internal linking. The engine the app is named for.
Content
Blog and page publishing, on-page SEO edits, translations, storefront copy, and media - all writing back to Shopify rather than living in a separate CMS.
Settings + Audit Log
Integration setup, and a unified audit log where every autonomous action writes a plain-language row with a 365-day retention default.
Same runtime, so moving up is a permission grant - not a migration.
Searchlight and Commerce OS are the same codebase running in two editions, against the same database. That has a practical consequence worth being precise about, because "seamless upgrade" is the kind of phrase that usually means nothing:
- Your data stays put. Crawl history, rank history, decay detections, content drafts and audit rows are already in the same store the suite reads from. Nothing is exported, re-imported or recomputed.
- It is a real second install, and we will say so. Because Searchlight is its own App Store listing with its own credentials, moving to the suite means installing Commerce OS and approving the wider scope set. It is one consent screen, not a project - but it is not invisible either.
- Nothing you configured is wasted. Integration connections, SEO rules, content settings and automation rules carry into the suite; the wider surfaces simply become reachable.
Worth knowing before you start: Searchlight is the narrower product on purpose, and we would rather you began there and grew than installed the suite and used a fifth of it.
Four reasons Searchlight is the wrong choice.
Published because the fastest way to lose a customer is to sell them the narrow product and let them discover the boundary in week three.
- You need multi-touch attribution across paid and organic - that is the suite's attribution engine, and it needs order and ad-platform scopes Searchlight does not request.
- You want automated bid or budget changes on Google, Meta or TikTok. Searchlight has no ad-platform write path at all.
- You run WhatsApp, SMS or email campaigns from the same tool. Messaging is a suite surface.
- You manage a portfolio of client shops and need approval queues, white-labelling or plan inheritance. That is Agency tier on the suite.
Start narrow. Grow when it earns it.
Searchlight installs into your Shopify admin and starts pulling Search Console data immediately. If you outgrow it, the suite is a permission grant away.