Description
Scolta AI Search is built and maintained by Tag1 Consulting, one of the leading open-source consulting firms in the world.
Scolta AI Search is a scoring, ranking, and AI layer built on Pagefind. It builds a static inverted index at publish time and runs a browser-side WASM search engine — no search server required.
Key features:
- Static search index — no Elasticsearch, Solr, or external search service needed
- Works on managed hosting (WP Engine, Kinsta, Flywheel, Pantheon) where running a search server is not possible
- Optional AI query expansion and result summarization (Anthropic, OpenAI, or self-hosted)
- Configurable scoring: title match boost, content match boost, recency decay curves
[scolta_search]shortcode to embed the search UI on any page- WP-CLI commands for building and maintaining the search index
- Content change tracking with automatic background rebuilds via Action Scheduler
- Conservative memory profile (≤96 MB peak) safe for shared hosting
Privacy: The base search tier runs entirely in the visitor’s browser — no server-side involvement beyond serving static files. The AI tier is optional and only sends the search query text and selected result excerpts to your configured AI provider.
Requirements: WordPress 6.1+, PHP 8.1+. The Pagefind binary is optional — the PHP indexer works without it.
External Services
This plugin connects to the following external services under specific conditions. No data is sent automatically — all connections are triggered by explicit admin action or explicit site configuration. In the WordPress.org distribution, all AI features are opt-in and OFF by default: the plugin makes no remote requests of any kind until an administrator enables AI features in Settings > Scolta or configures an API key.
GitHub API (api.github.com)
When: An administrator runs the wp scolta download-pagefind WP-CLI command to download the Pagefind binary.
What is sent: A standard HTTPS GET request to https://api.github.com/repos/CloudCannon/pagefind/releases/latest. No personally identifiable information is transmitted beyond the standard HTTP request headers (IP address, user agent).
Service: GitHub, operated by GitHub, Inc. (a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation).
Terms of Service: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service
Privacy Statement: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-policies/github-general-privacy-statement
Pagefind Binary (GitHub Releases / CloudCannon)
When: The wp scolta download-pagefind WP-CLI command downloads the Pagefind binary from GitHub Releases (github.com) after querying the GitHub API above.
What is sent: A standard HTTPS GET request to download the release archive. No personally identifiable information is transmitted beyond the standard HTTP request headers.
Service: Pagefind is an open-source project (MIT license) created and maintained by CloudCannon.
Pagefind: https://pagefind.app/
CloudCannon: https://cloudcannon.com/
Pagefind License: https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/blob/main/LICENSE
AI Provider APIs
When: A user performs a search and the site administrator has enabled AI features (ai: true in the Scolta configuration). AI features are disabled by default and require an API key to be configured.
What is sent: The user’s search query text and selected page content excerpts (for result summarization) are sent to the configured AI provider’s API endpoint.
Providers: The specific provider depends on site configuration. Supported providers are:
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Anthropic (Claude) — processes search queries and page excerpts. API endpoint: api.anthropic.com.
Terms of Service: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms
Privacy Policy: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy -
OpenAI — processes search queries and page excerpts. API endpoint: api.openai.com.
Terms of Use: https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use
Privacy Policy: https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy -
OpenAI-compatible endpoints (including self-hosted Ollama and other providers) — any endpoint configured by the site administrator that speaks the OpenAI API protocol. Review the terms and privacy policy of your chosen provider.
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WordPress AI Services (wp-ai-services plugin) — delegates to whichever provider is configured in that plugin. Review the terms and privacy policy of that provider.
No AI API calls are made unless the site administrator has explicitly enabled AI features and configured a valid API key.
Amazee.ai (amazee.ai)
When: Only after an explicit admin action: an administrator clicks “Enable AI features” in Settings > Scolta, or starts a trial / signs in via Settings > Scolta > Amazee.ai. The plugin never contacts amazee.ai on activation or without one of these explicit steps, and the consequences (including exactly what is sent) are stated in the admin UI before confirmation.
What is sent: The site admin email address (to create the trial account, sent to api.amazee.ai), or the email address entered during sign-in; and AI search queries and result excerpts when the Amazee.ai gateway is the active AI provider.
Service: Amazee.ai, a privacy-respecting AI gateway. Credentials are stored encrypted in the WordPress options table.
Terms of Service: https://amazee.ai/terms
Privacy Policy: https://amazee.ai/privacy
Source code and compiled assets
The distribution archive contains a small number of compiled or binary files. All of them are required at runtime and built from public, open-source projects:
assets/wasm/scolta_core_bg.wasm— the browser-side search engine, compiled from the public source at https://github.com/tag1consulting/scolta-core withwasm-pack build --target web --release(outputpkg/scolta_core_bg.wasm). No modifications are made to the build output.vendor/tag1/scolta-php/assets/pagefind/wasm.en.pagefind,wasm.unknown.pagefind,pagefind.js, andpagefind-worker.js— the unmodified runtime of the open-source Pagefind project (https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind, MIT license). The indexer copies these files into every generated search index; removing them would break client-side search.- Dependency
LICENSE*files undervendor/are retained as required by those packages’ license terms.
About Tag1 Consulting
Scolta is designed, built, and maintained by Tag1 Consulting. Tag1 has been delivering technology leadership since 2007 and is one of the leading open-source consulting firms in the world.
Tag1 offers AI strategy, architecture, and implementation consulting — from evaluating whether AI search is right for your organization, to production deployment and ongoing tuning. If you need help integrating Scolta, customizing scoring for your content model, or connecting it to your AI provider of choice, get in touch.
Installation
- Upload the
scoltadirectory to/wp-content/plugins/, or install via the WordPress plugin screen. - Activate through the Plugins screen.
- Build the search index:
wp scolta build - Add
[scolta_search]to any page. - Optionally configure an AI provider key in
wp-config.php:define('SCOLTA_API_KEY', 'sk-ant-...');
FAQ
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Does this require a search server?
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No. Scolta uses Pagefind’s static index — all search runs in the visitor’s browser. No Elasticsearch, Solr, or external service required.
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Does this work on managed hosting?
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Yes. The PHP indexer works without
exec()or Node.js, making it compatible with WP Engine, Kinsta, Flywheel, Pantheon, and other managed hosts. -
Is the AI tier required?
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No. The base search tier works without any API key. In the WordPress.org distribution, all AI features are opt-in and OFF by default: the plugin makes no remote requests of any kind until an administrator explicitly enables AI features in Settings > Scolta or configures an API key.
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What AI providers are supported?
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Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (including self-hosted Ollama). If no API key is configured, an administrator can enable AI features in Settings > Scolta, which provisions free Amazee.ai trial credits — this is an explicit opt-in step and never happens automatically.
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What happens when I enable AI features?
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Enabling AI features in Settings > Scolta provisions a free Amazee.ai trial: your site admin email address is sent to amazee.ai (api.amazee.ai) to create the trial account, and AI search queries plus result excerpts are then processed by the Amazee.ai gateway. The settings page states this before you confirm, with links to Amazee.ai’s terms and privacy policy. If you configure your own API key instead, nothing is ever sent to amazee.ai.
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Does this work with WooCommerce?
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Yes. WooCommerce product metadata (price, SKU, stock status, categories) is automatically extracted and indexed. Price is emitted as a sortable field so search results can be sorted by price. WooCommerce ships with Action Scheduler, so automatic background rebuilds work out of the box with no additional dependencies.
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How do I keep the search index up to date?
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Install Action Scheduler and enable auto_rebuild in Settings > Scolta. The plugin will automatically queue a rebuild whenever content is saved. WooCommerce sites already have Action Scheduler installed.
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Why am I getting fewer search results than before?
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Scolta defaults to a conservative search breadth so generic words don’t flood your results. On a recipe, product, or catalog site, that can hide useful domain words you actually want to match. Go to Settings > Scolta > Site Type and choose the Recipe & Content Catalog preset, then save and run
wp scolta build. The preset widens the search breadth and tunes ranking for catalog-style content. See the “Tuning search breadth” section of the plugin README for the full guide.
Reviews
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Contributors & Developers
“Scolta AI Search” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “Scolta AI Search” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.0.7
- On the WordPress.org distribution, all remote AI functionality is opt-in: activation contacts no remote service and AI features default off.
- The /health endpoint now returns only the overall status to anonymous (logged-out) requesters — a user-visible REST API change.
- Amazee.ai credentials are now stored with authenticated encryption (encrypt-then-MAC) instead of plain encryption.
- When the stored Amazee.ai connection is no longer accepted, AI search degrades gracefully and wp-admin shows a prompt to reconnect; the /health endpoint reflects the credential state.
- Ordinary page views no longer pay two extra non-autoloaded option reads per request on hosts without a persistent object cache.
- Scheduler and admin index builds now run the same streamed, budget-aware pipeline as
wp scolta build, and both content paths produce identical items via one shared mapper. - Amazee.ai credentials stored without resolved model names now self-heal by re-resolving the model against the stored credentials, instead of leaving AI unavailable; the /health endpoint reports AI status accurately.
- Several admin and CLI fixes: connecting Amazee.ai no longer overwrites a customized AI model, the budget-exceeded admin notice can display, the dashboard widget is hidden from non-administrators, “Reset to default” on the custom-prompt fields works, “Rebuild Now” honors the build lock, and
wp scolta clear-cachealso clears transient timeout rows. - Synced the bundled browser script, stylesheet, and modern stemmer from scolta-php 1.0.5 (AI-Overview latency fix and the up-to-date Snowball stemmer).
- Trimmed bundled dependency documentation from the distribution archive.
- Clarified historical changelog entries.
1.0.4
- New expansion_combine_mode scoring setting (default relevance_union; preset-defaulted to round_robin for catalog-style Site Types) for round-robin AI-summary candidate selection across query-expansion sub-queries. The Expansion Per-Term Top K setting is removed (locked at 3 upstream).
- Facet panel is now index-driven and static: dimensions/values come from the index taxonomy in fixed alphabetical order with exact typed-query counts — nothing appears, disappears, or reorders across a search or AI expansion.
- Saving the settings form no longer stores a silently-truncated copy of an over-length default prompt as a stale custom prompt.
- Search-tuning help relabeled “Search Breadth (advanced)” and reworded to lead with the Site Type preset; new FAQ on getting fewer results than expected.
- Restored sort/filter badge styles that had drifted out of the bundled stylesheet; the Composer install hook and CI drift check now cover all duplicated front-end assets.
- Synced bundled browser script: zero-result blank-panel fix, correct singular/plural result count, quoted-query rendering fix, AI-summary citation de-duplication, facet-collapse fix (filtered dimensions stay switchable), and facet counts on long conversational queries.
1.0.3
- Browsers no longer serve a stale bundled script/stylesheet after a deploy (cache-busting now keyed to the shipped asset, not the static plugin version).
- AI Provider settings field now reflects the saved provider instead of always showing Amazee when Amazee credentials are present (display-only bug).
- New expand_subword_max_frequency (default 0.05) and expand_subword_deny_list scoring settings for the sub-word frequency guard: broad-query recall without high-frequency noise, with a per-site veto list for typed-but-generic words.
- Scoring default tuning to match scolta-php: cross_list_bonus 0.05, recency_boost_max 0.25, title_match_boost 2.0.
1.0.2
- Export files now use a nested directory layout mirroring canonical URLs, aligning binary indexer output with the PHP indexer.
- HTML file counting in status/health uses a recursive directory walk instead of a flat glob.
- AI summary citation URLs now prefer the canonical URL over the Pagefind file path.
1.0.1
- WordPress.org review fixes: dist allowlist with CI guard, REST SCOLTA_PLUGIN_DIR, removed CLI display_errors.
- Decoupled release build from lockstep scolta-php tagging (composer.lock pins scolta-php 1.0.0 from Packagist).
- Plugin Check fixes: Requires-at-least 6.1, $_SERVER sanitization.
- Extracted dist build/validate into reusable scripts.
- Added check-wp-version job to release workflow.
1.0.0
- First stable release.
- Exact title match boost, filter exact-match-first, expansion merge scoring fix.
- Facet count refresh and multi-value OR fix, sort intersection replaced with filter+sort discovery.
- Minimum stability changed to stable, WP_Filesystem for cleanup, uninstall handler improvements.
1.0.0-rc4
- Health endpoint now includes index detail: fragment count, last-build timestamp, and integrity status.
- Exclude vendor test directories and duplicate WASM from release ZIP.
- Align readme.txt Stable Tag with SCOLTA_VERSION.
- Add External Services section to readme.txt for WordPress.org compliance.
- Replace inline script tags with wp_add_inline_script() for WordPress.org compliance.
- Show Scolta attribution setting (default: off).
- dir_to_url() now uses wp_upload_dir() baseurl for index paths under the uploads directory.
- Text domain changed to scolta-ai-search for WordPress.org translation support.
1.0.0-rc3
- PCP distribution build: zero errors, zero warnings.
- VCS repository for scolta-php in composer.json (replaces local path reference).
- expand_primary_weight now correctly weights original vs. expansion results.
- WordPress Plugin Check (PCP) compliance for wordpress.org submission.
- Documentation now clearly attributes Scolta to Tag1 Consulting.
1.0.0-rc2
- First release candidate.
- PHP indexer as the default (no binary required).
- Optional Amazee.ai integration.
- Action Scheduler integration for automatic background rebuilds.
- Configurable memory profiles: conservative (96 MB), balanced (384 MB), aggressive (1 GB).