SearchStax Site Search release notes for January 8, 2026 include status labels for Promotions and Rules, crawler exclusion updates, and auto-suggest special character handling.
Highlights
- Status labels and draft indicator for Promotions and Rules: Added new visual cues to the Promotions and Rules pages to make it easier to see which are enabled, disabled, or awaiting publication.
- Crawler sitemap processing: Improved sitemap-based discovery so URL exclusions are applied consistently.
- Auto-suggest special characters: Updated auto-suggest so suggestions can include special characters.
Added
Status Labels and Draft Indicator for Promotions and Rules
Each item on the Promotions and Rules pages now shows a status label so you can see whether it’s enabled or disabled. Items with unpublished changes also show a draft indicator (a blue dot) next to the status label.
- Enabled: The item is enabled.
- Disabled: The item is disabled.
- Draft indicator (blue dot): The item has unpublished changes. The dot appears after you save changes as a draft and disappears after you publish.
Changed
Crawler Exclusions and Sitemap Discovery
The crawler now handles sitemaps and URL exclusions more consistently. It reads sitemap files to find page URLs, even if your exclusion patterns match the sitemap file name. It then applies your URL exclusions to the page URLs listed in the sitemap, so excluded pages are skipped. Pages that are only listed in the sitemap aren’t automatically indexed.
Auto-Suggest Special Character Handling
Suggestions shown in Auto-Suggest now preserve special characters (for example, parentheses (), ampersands &, and symbols such as !, @, #, $, %, and ^).
Rollout
- Target date: Thursday, January 8, 2026
- Scope: All SearchStax Site Search customers
- Expected issues: None expected
Known issues
None expected.
Other Release Notes
These release notes cover updates to SearchStax Site Search. Release notes for the SearchStax Drupal module and UI Kits are published separately.
- SearchStax Drupal Module: See Releases for SearchStax Studio for version-by-version notes and the changelog. For setup and configuration guidance, see Drupal Module.
- SearchStax UI Kits: See UI Kits for documentation and getting started guides. For version history and developer-focused change details, check the npm package page for your UI Kit: Angular, Javascript, React, Vue.
When an update to the Drupal module or UI Kits affects the Site Search user experience, we also call it out in these release notes.