How Touchless powers instant, scalable vehicle search for large dealer groups

The company uses Meilisearch to deliver fast, faceted inventory search across multi-location dealer marketplaces - without fighting the tool.

Auto Genius is the market-facing brand of Touchless, a Toronto-based technology company building performance infrastructure for automotive retail. Touchless has two main products powered by its proprietary technology platform.

• The first, Speed Layer, uses the EXO tunnel system to make any existing dealer website dramatically faster, with no replatform needed, and is currently deployed across 1,000 domains. This product does not interact with Meilisearch at present, though there is potential for stack consolidation in the future.
• The second is the marketplace platform, primarily serving large auto dealer groups. This proprietary product is built on the EXO rendering system (ERS), which powers full vehicle inventory search and discovery. Meilisearch is at the core of that marketplace experience, delivering a modern, fast, and centralized brand experience for large dealer groups.

The challenge: large dealer groups need a different kind of search

Most dealer websites are slow, cluttered, and built on legacy infrastructure - a far cry from the experience car buyers now expect. The Touchless’ marketplace platform is designed to fix that, serving larger dealer groups with multiple locations each, and inventories that typically range from 3,000 to 9,000 vehicles.

In the automotive industry, every vehicle is unique, identified by a VIN (vehicle identification number), with its own make, model, year, trim, mileage, fuel type, transmission, color, and price. Buyers navigate that complexity almost entirely through faceted search, and a search experience that is slow, rigid, or hard to filter doesn't just frustrate - it sends shoppers to a competitor.

This is why large dealer groups come to Touchless - for a modernized, centralized brand experience across their locations and higher conversion rates. That means speed and design are non-negotiable: first page load, interactivity, filter response, and infinite scroll all need to be exceptionally fast.

Touchless had built its own EXO rendering system - a custom stack leveraging Cloudflare edge workers and web sockets for near-instant page delivery. But to make vehicle search itself feel effortless, they needed a search engine that could keep pace and integrate cleanly with that architecture.

The solution: Meilisearch via the EXO platform

The Touchless team had previously used Algolia, but switched to Meilisearch for three core reasons: API flexibility, integration with edge infrastructure, and cost-efficiency.

Stefan Šoć-McLeod, Chief Software Engineer at Touchless, puts it plainly:

"Meilisearch is API-first, which means the team could build exactly the product they wanted on top of it. For a team running a custom rendering engine, indexing strategy, and recommendation logic, that flexibility was essential."

Meilisearch also proved a natural fit for the EXO stack. The EXO rendering system - a custom rendering and routing layer - runs on Cloudflare edge workers and web sockets. Meilisearch's API topology connects cleanly to that kind of architecture, enabling search queries to be resolved at the edge with low latency. The two technologies are, in Stefan's words, "married really nicely."

The pricing model also made Meilisearch a more sustainable foundation for a multi-tenant product at scale. That becomes especially meaningful when the cost of search compounds across dozens of dealer indexes.

Implementation: from raw dealer data to live search in 20 minutes

Onboarding a new dealer group starts with data ingestion. Automotive data arrives from multiple third-party sources - and from dealers who simply drop files onto an FTP server - in inconsistent, poorly formatted shapes. The team runs this through a normalization pipeline that standardizes the data, loads it into Sanity, which functions as a database, and then populates Meilisearch from there.

Each dealer group gets its own dedicated Meilisearch index. Spinning up a new one takes around 100 milliseconds. Once the team has the client's data, they can have a live preview with full search and vehicle detail pages ready in 20 minutes.

Today, Meilisearch powers both the search and filter experience and infinite scroll across the marketplace sites for 13 dealer groups, with each group having up to 9,000 vehicles in its inventory and totaling about 100 locations. As a buyer navigates, filtering by body style, setting a price range, narrowing by mileage — results respond instantly without a page reload. The scroll never catches up. It's a qualitative step change from what most dealer sites serve today.

Kyle Mountsier - Co-founder/COO, says: ”With Meilisearch, you get a modern experience of instant interactivity, and you get an infinite scroll that you can barely catch.”

Source: https://www.casaautogroup.com/shop

The results: a search experience that sells

Touchless’ marketplace sites are among the most performant car-shopping experiences available to dealer groups today. The proprietary EXO system as a whole, with Meilisearch as the search layer, delivers the kind of instant interactivity that large dealer groups use to drive brand consistency and conversion across all their locations.

The impact is visible in the product: filter latency that feels instantaneous, infinite scroll that moves faster than a shopper can reasonably keep up with, and a search experience that surfaces the right car quickly.

Conclusion: the API-first search engine for specialist platforms

Touchless is building a highly custom product for a highly specific market. That demands infrastructure that stays out of the way and connects where needed, not tools that dictate how you build.

Meilisearch fits that bill. Its API flexibility lets the team at Touchless build a custom indexing strategy, a bespoke recommendation layer, and tight integration with Cloudflare edge infrastructure, without fighting the tool. For SaaS teams building multi-tenant, performance-critical products on modern stacks, that kind of interoperability is the difference between a search layer that limits you and one that frees you to focus on what actually differentiates your product.