Meilisearch updates: March 2026

Welcome to the March edition of Meilisearch updates! We've been shipping multiple improvements to search relevance, hit a major milestone for distributed search, made exciting AI performance gains, and continued our commitment to security transparency.

Product updates: what's new at Meilisearch

Cloud UI: Generate better AI prompts, right from the Cloud

A prompt generator is now available directly in the Meilisearch Cloud UI. It helps you craft effective prompts for your AI-powered search workflows without leaving the dashboard - less back-and-forth, faster iteration:

Cloud UI: Delete documents from the Cloud UI

You can now delete documents from your index directly in the Cloud interface. No API calls needed for quick cleanup or content management tasks:

Cloud UI: Index stats at a glance

Index statistics are now visible in the Cloud UI, giving you an immediate view of your index size, document count, and field distribution - useful for understanding your data and keeping indexes healthy:

More control over your search ranking

Version v1.36 introduces two new ranking rules:

• attributeRank: Prioritizes matches found in higher-weighted searchable attributes, without factoring in where the match appears within that attribute.
• wordPosition: Prioritizes matches that appear closer to the beginning of an attribute, regardless of the attribute's weight.

Previously, the attribute ranking rule applied both behaviors in a fixed order. Now you can use them independently for finer control, and it's easier to slot custom ranking rules like price or publication date exactly where you need them in your ranking pipeline. Learn more about the new ranking rules.

Search performance logs are available in the API

Want to know exactly where your search time is going? The new showPerformanceDetails parameter returns a breakdown of time spent at each stage of a search query, making it much easier to debug slow queries and understand search performance under the hood. More here.

Replication is now in the engine!

v1.37 shipped replicated sharding directly in the Meilisearch engine. This is the most significant step yet toward making distributed, resilient search available to all users - and a direct stepping stone to one-click replication in the Cloud UI.

Available now under our Enterprise edition. What’s next? One-click setup in the Cloud UI is on the way - stay tuned.

Faster, more reliable AI-powered indexing

• We've stabilized our HNSW-backed vector store (Hannoy). The legacy vectorStoreSetting experimental feature has been permanently removed. During a dumpless upgrade, the engine will automatically migrate your indexes to the new backend. Newly created indexes will use the HNSW store by default, bringing improved embedding performance and consistency. More here.

Our v1.38 release significantly improves embedding indexing performance:

• Drastically faster embedding updates: We eliminated unnecessary full database scans when adding or updating embeddings. Adding embeddings to a large index is now far more efficient.
• Reliable remote embedders: A fix for intermittent connection reset by peer errors when using remote embedders, improving stability for AI-powered search workflows.
• Improved task deletion: A long-standing edge case with task and batch deletion has been resolved.

Vector search users: our v1.38 release includes important embedding performance improvements and reliability fixes. The update is backward-compatible. What’s next? We're also working on an easier way to configuring the chat settings in Cloud UI. Stay tuned for more!

📍 See our updated public roadmap here.

Community & ecosystem

Meilisearch & Rust Foundation

It's official: Meilisearch is now a member of the Rust Foundation. Built on Rust from day one, this felt like a natural step, and a way to give back to the ecosystem that makes our engine fast and reliable.

Events

FOSDEM 2026 in Brussels.

• Our team had a blast at FOSDEM in Brussels this past January - it was great to connect with so many passionate developers from the open source community. If you missed our talk on language support, the recording is now available.

AWS Summit in Paris on April 1st.

• Coming to AWS Summit in Paris on April 1st? It's free to attend - so if you're around, swing by our booth for a demo and a chat with the team.

Security & transparency

• As a security improvement, the mini-dashboard now stores API keys in RAM instead of localStorage. More here.
• A security researcher recently disclosed a vulnerability to our team through responsible disclosure. We investigated, fixed the issue immediately, and coordinated a public CVE disclosure. We're grateful to the community for helping us keep Meilisearch secure. Learn more here.