Shutterstock unlocks 23% increase in search satisfaction with Marqo
Company Overview
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 subsidury 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 — serving as the first and most frequent touchpoint for customers sourcing creative content for their websites, videos, branding, and other digital productions.
Challenge
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 resiliencemodern minimalist business backgroundLimited understanding of artistic style, mood, or conceptual themes
High abandonment rates for vague, typo-prone, or exploratory searches
Inconsistent performance on mobile, where many B2B and enterprise users begin creative searches
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, an AI-native vector search engine built for product and content discovery. In a seamless implementation:
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%↑
Improvement in search satisfaction for Marqo results. Highly relevant results now displayed for conceptual and semantic queries.
Improved discoverability for non-text modalities
Due to Marqo's flexibility in representing multiple modalities, Envato was able to roll out Marqo to a wide range of content types such as icons, stock photos, video and audio, improving discoverability and user experience.
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.
The result:
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.
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