Envato (a Shutterstock Company) creative marketplace

23%

Increase in search satisfaction

Industry:Stock photography

Business Unit:Creation, Licensing

Use Case:Product Discovery & Conversion Optimization

Channel:Website

Key Objectives:Improve Content Relevance & Discovery

Products:

Creative AssetsMarketplaceB2B

Shutterstock unlocks 23% increase in search satisfaction with Marqo

Company Overview

Shutterstock Envato (a Shutterstock Company) is a leading global creative ecosystem offering high-quality digital assets including website templates, video, audio, graphics, and plugins to designers, developers, marketers, and content creators. It's a subsidiary of Shutterstock, serving approximately 30% of all Shutterstock users. With a library of over 10 million assets and a worldwide community of contributors and customers, Envato powers creative projects in over 200 countries through its marketplaces, API integrations, and subscription services.

The company's search experience is mission-critical, acting as the first and most frequent touchpoint for customers as they source creative content for websites, videos, branding, and other digital productions.

Challenges

With an ever-expanding content library and a highly diverse global customer base, Shutterstock's legacy keyword-based search system faced several limitations:

Difficulty handling conceptual or abstract queries — Hopeful Resilience · Modern Minimalist Business Backgrounds

Missing session metrics, category IDs, and clear collection names — made performance analysis and search-logic refinement difficult

Envato needed a more intelligent, intuitive search solution that could better interpret user intent, recommend relevant alternatives, and increase overall marketplace engagement and conversion.

Solution

Envato partnered with Marqo to modernize content discovery across its global creative marketplace. By replacing keyword-heavy search with Marqo's AI native, multimodal engine, Envato introduced an intent aware discovery experience that understands how creatives think, search, and evaluate visual content at scale. Marqo brought semantic and visual understanding across images, video, vectors, and AI generated assets, allowing search to interpret natural language queries, creative concepts, and stylistic intent rather than relying on exact keyword matches. Results became more adaptive by learning from engagement signals such as clicks, previews, saves, and licenses, so the most relevant and high performing assets consistently rose to the top. This reduced friction, shortened time to value, and helped customers make confident creative choices faster. Together, these capabilities transformed Envato's search into a creative discovery engine that feels fast, intuitive, and confidence building for marketers, designers, and media teams. In a rapid rollout, the team:

Marqo's vector search replaced Envato's keyword-based system across the website and API endpoints.
AI-powered semantic search allowed users to find relevant assets based on meaning, style, and concept — not just exact word matches.
Vector embeddings captured mood, visual themes, and artistic style, improving discovery for ambiguous or abstract queries.

Results

Following a controlled A/B test on production traffic, Envato observed the following improvements:

23%

Increase in search satisfaction

Improved discoverability across asset types

Highly relevant results surfaced consistently across categories and formats

What This Means

For a content-driven marketplace like Envato, every improvement in search relevance and performance directly translates to revenue and customer loyalty. With Marqo, Envato transformed its search experience from a keyword-dependent system to an intuitive, meaning-driven discovery engine.

More exploratory searches converted into positive interactions such as downloads.
Improved user experience, better discoverability across a wide range of modalities.
Significantly improved search satisfaction.