Get Started with AEM Content AI Search
Traditional site search matches the words a visitor types against the words in your content. That works well when visitors use the same terminology as your content. It fails when they ask a question, express an intent, or phrase things differently. Search is one of the clearest signals of visitor intent on a site, so a failed match often means a failed journey: content goes undiscovered, engagement drops, and conversions are lost. Visitors increasingly expect search to understand what they mean, not just what they typed. The same intent-aware foundation also makes generative answers possible.
AEM Content AI Search doesn’t replace your site’s search experience - it evolves it, from matching keywords, to understanding meaning and intent, to answering questions directly. Semantic Search adds intent-aware retrieval on top of your existing search experience, surfacing relevant content even when a query doesn’t share the content’s exact wording. Generative Search builds on that same retrieval foundation to produce contextual, generated answers grounded in your site’s own content - a distinct step, not the same thing as semantic retrieval.
For visitors, this means better relevance, natural-language support, fewer zero-result searches, and faster answers. For your business, it means better intent matching, stronger content discovery, and an AI-ready search foundation - without rebuilding your search experience from scratch. And for your team, it’s an incremental upgrade: your existing search component can move from lexical, to semantic, to generative capabilities step by step, rather than requiring a new implementation.
To get there, you make two decisions: how your content gets into Content AI, and which component brings it to visitors. To give visitors relevant results and intent-based answers, connect your content, then add a search component to a page.
Prerequisites prerequisites
Before you begin, ensure the following conditions are met:
- You have an active Cloud Manager program with at least one AEM as a Cloud Service environment.
- Your user is assigned to the AEM Users product profile (to view content sources) and/or AEM Administrators (to create and edit them) on both the author and publish tiers. See Assign a user to an AEM product profile for the full procedure.
- The environment’s product profile has been provisioned in Adobe Admin Console.
Step 1a - Connect an Existing Index option-a
Existing repository indexes appear automatically in the Content Sources list as Source Type AEM - shown by what they index, such as Pages, Assets, or Content Fragments. They start out Restricted and locked, not yet searchable through Content AI.
- Sign in to Cloud Manager, select your program, and open the Content AI Configuration tab for the environment you want to configure.
- Find the source you want to search against (for example, Pages) and select its lock icon. Only users with the AEM Administrators product profile can do this - AEM Users can view content sources, not change their searchability.
- Read the Make source searchable? dialog carefully. It warns that Apache Oak access control lists (ACLs) are not enforced for this index after it becomes searchable. Any authenticated user can retrieve all of its content. Check I understand that access controls (ACLs) are not enforced and all content in this source will be searchable, then select Make searchable.
- Confirm the status changes to Available. A warning icon stays next to the source as a permanent reminder that ACLs are bypassed for it.
- To verify the results, run a test search.
Step 1b - Crawl a Website option-b
Use this path if you don’t already have a search index for your site. Content AI’s own crawler builds and refreshes one for you. This crawling process is also referred to as acquisition throughout Cloud Manager and this guide.
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Open the Content AI Configuration tab, the same as in Step 1a.
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Select Create Source and fill in the fields. Only users with the AEM Administrators product profile can add new content sources.
table 0-row-2 1-row-2 2-row-2 3-row-2 4-row-2 Field Description Content AI Configuration Name A unique identifier for this source. Cannot be changed after creation. Website address The root URL to crawl, for example https://www.example.com/.Exclude URLs (Optional) URL patterns to skip during crawling. Refresh frequency Weekly, Daily, Daily 4×, 60 Min, or 15 Min. -
Select Create Source. Acquisition starts automatically, and the source moves to Indexing.
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Monitor the status until it reaches Available:
table 0-row-2 1-row-2 2-row-2 3-row-2 Status Meaning New Source just created; automatic acquisition hasn’t started yet. Indexing Crawling and indexing in progress. Available Indexing complete - ready to serve search queries. -
To confirm that your content was indexed correctly, select the search icon next to the source and run a test query.
Step 2 - Choose a Search Component choose-component
There are two components that can put search on a page, built on different foundations:
Quick Search (v3) with Semantic Search quicksearch
If your site already uses the classic AEM Quick Search component, v3 adds an opt-in AI Search toggle visitors can switch on - no new component, proxy, or Content Source required.
- Search still runs through the same JCR/QueryBuilder path as today - nothing changes in the result servlet or how results render.
- When a visitor enables the toggle, the component prefixes the query with a special marker that routes it to semantic matching instead of plain keyword full text search.
- This path has no generative answer summary. It improves the match quality of the existing results list; it doesn’t add a generative AI answer.
- Step 1 (Content AI onboarding) does not apply to this path. There’s no Content Source to create or connect - this component queries your existing page index directly.
Use this path if you want an incremental semantic search upgrade without adopting a new component or Content Sources. It is not the right path if you want the generative answer experience; use AEM Content AI Search for that.
AEM Content AI Search gensearch
AEM Content AI Search is an AEM Core Component that lets visitors search a Content Source directly from a page, with both semantic search and generative search capabilities.
Prerequisites gensearch-prerequisites
- AEM Core Components installed on your project.
- At least one Content Source already created and in Available status.
- The AEM Content AI Client OSGi configuration (
ContentAIClientImpl) set up on both author and publish, with a valid API credential and a default Content Source.
For the full setup guide - making the component available to authors, wiring up its client library, and configuring the dialog - see the Core Components documentation.
Congratulations! congratulations
You have successfully set up your semantic and generative search capabilities.
Next Steps next-steps
- Set Up an Adobe Developer Console Project - Create the ADC project and credentials you need to call the Content AI API directly.
- Content AI API reference - Query your indexed content using semantic, generative, or hybrid search endpoints.
- Core Components documentation - More on proxy components and template policies.