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 your content does - but it breaks down the moment they ask a question, express an intent, or simply 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 - and that same intent-aware foundation is what makes generative answers possible in the first place.
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 an entirely new implementation.
Getting there comes down to two decisions: how your content gets into Content AI, and which component brings it to visitors. Connect your content, then add a search component to a page - and your site is ready to give visitors the most relevant results and intent-based answers.
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), assigned at the publish tier - Content AI indexes published content, not authored content. 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) will not be enforced for this index once searchable - any authenticated user will be able to 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.
- Run a test search to verify results come back correctly.
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. -
Select the search icon next to the source and run a test query to confirm your content was indexed correctly.
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.
- There’s no generative-answer summary on this path. 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.
This path is a good fit 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.