What Is Recall? Why Missing Products in Search Results Costs You Revenue

Recall is an essential yet often overlooked metric in ecommerce search, measuring the fraction of relevant products that appear in search results and highlighting the invisible revenue loss when products are not surfaced. Low recall occurs when search systems rely on keyword matching, failing to recognize relevant products that do not contain exact query words, which particularly impacts categories like fashion and beauty due to fluid vocabularies. This invisibility leads to lost sales, inefficient catalog use, and skewed demand on a few products, while improved recall, as demonstrated by Marqo's AI-native product discovery platform, can enhance revenue by ensuring a broader range of relevant products appear in search results. Marqo's approach utilizes comprehensive product understanding to bridge the vocabulary gap, addressing the recall problem by connecting queries to relevant products based on their attributes rather than exact keyword matches, thus improving the visibility of both new and existing products in catalogs.