Switching from Klevu to Layers: A Shopify Plus Migration Guide

If you run a Shopify Plus store on Klevu and you are weighing a move to Layers, start with the honest part. Klevu's search is good, and unlike a platform-agnostic engine, it is built for Shopify.

This guide is not about a broken product. It is about what changed under Klevu, what you actually run today, what ports over, and what you rebuild.

Why are Klevu customers looking right now?

Because the platform they chose is being folded into a different one. In January 2025, Searchspring combined with Klevu and Intelligent Reach into a single company, Athos Commerce.

Klevu.com now opens with "Klevu is now Athos Commerce." The three products are being folded into one rebuilt stack.

Athos has published the timeline. The new platform reaches general availability in Q1 2026, with a "migration path for Klevu customers", and the legacy platforms are retired starting in 2027.

So the decision is not "stay put versus move." You are migrating regardless. The only question is where you land: Athos's new platform, or a tool built only for Shopify Plus.

None of this makes Klevu a bad product. The ground under it is moving, and that is reason enough to look at your options.

Should you switch from Klevu to Layers?

Switch if you are done paying for and coordinating three separate Klevu modules, you want real-time catalog sync, and you want merchandising your own team can run.

Stay on Klevu, or move to Athos, if you sell across several platforms, or if Klevu's search relevance is the one thing you care about and the packaging does not bother you.

The teams that switch and are glad they did tend to share a profile:

• One Shopify Plus store, or a Markets setup, not a multi-platform estate.
• A team tired of the search, merchandising, and recommendations modules billing as three line items.
• A merchandiser who wants drag-and-drop control without an add-on tier to unlock it.
• A team that would rather own its storefront markup than run a vendor's hosted templates.

What are you actually running on Klevu?

More than a search box. A live Klevu install is three subscriptions, a gated sync, a hosted UI in your theme, and tuning that lives in Klevu's dashboard. Five things make up the surface.

1. Three separate modules. Site Search is $649, Category Merchandising $549, and Recommendations $449 a month, the latter two sold as add-ons that stack to about $1,647. Merch features like drag-and-drop, scheduling, and preview sit inside the Category Merchandising add-on, not the base search.
2. A batch feed with a gated delta. Klevu builds a product feed from Shopify's APIs, then runs a delta sync every 10 minutes on products changed in the last 15. It has to be turned on by Klevu support, and it skips metafield edits, collection changes, inventory-on-order, and deletions.
3. A hosted search UI in your theme. Klevu injects its own Template JS and CSS through Theme App Blocks, plus Liquid snippets, a collection section, and a page.klevu-search-results template, with core includes added to theme.liquid.
4. Tuning locked in the dashboard. Synonyms and URL redirects export as CSV, but boost rules, product and self-learning scores, and analytics live in the Klevu Merchant Center with no export.
5. Synonym maintenance. Relevance leans on comma-separated synonym lists your team keeps by hand, term by term.

What changes when you move to Layers?

The subscriptions collapse to one, the sync goes real-time, and your catalog stops being a feed. Here is the map.

What ports over, and what you retire?

Some of your Klevu setup is portable, and some of it was never worth moving.

You can export your synonyms and URL redirects as CSV and bring them across. But your boost rules, product and self-learning scores, and analytics live in the Klevu Merchant Center with no export, so those get re-authored, not migrated.

On Layers, the ongoing tuning work shrinks. There are no synonym lists to keep, because our query understanding expands queries automatically. You can still add an explicit synonym when a brand term needs it, but the maintenance is gone.

The self-learning scores you cannot export do not need porting either. Layers starts learning from your shoppers at cutover and keeps tuning.

Expect a short ramp as it gathers signal. We re-author the few boost rules that encode a real merchandising call up front, so nothing important waits on the model.

How does the migration actually work?

A staged switch, not a big-bang cutover. You build and prove it on a draft theme before a single shopper sees it, then publish and move template by template, with your old theme one revert away.

1. Map your URLs and config first. Export Klevu's synonyms and search-term redirects as CSV, and scope which search and collection URLs stay put. Those URLs live in your Shopify theme routes, so they hold through the switch and you rarely need SEO 301s.
2. Install Layers and sync the catalog. Installing the app syncs your catalog through real-time webhooks at the store level. Nothing shopper-facing changes yet.
3. Rebuild the storefront UI on a draft theme. This is the real work. Klevu was rendering your search and collection UI, so you rebuild it on the Layers SDK, and our team does that build. The app embed plumbing, auth, tracking, and redirects, needs no theme code; the UI itself is a code build our team owns.
4. Validate before you publish. Preview merchandising on your live storefront with live preview, and validate search on the draft theme, confirming collection pages stay server-rendered with crawlable product links. Klevu keeps serving production.
5. Bring over the little that ports, retire the rest. Import your synonyms and redirects if you still want them, re-author the handful of boost rules that reflect a real decision, and drop the synonym maintenance for good.
6. Publish, and cut over template by template. Both systems can coexist behind template gates during the transition. We scope tracking per template so events are not double-counted, and revenue reads from your native Shopify order data, one source of truth.
7. Prove each surface, with rollback ready. Validate ranking changes with Layers' sort-order A/B experiments (in beta) or a matched pre and post read. Your previous theme is one revert away.
8. Retire Klevu last. Only after cutover, remove the Klevu app embeds and blocks, delete the injected snippets, section, and template, strip the theme.liquid includes, and cancel all three module subscriptions.

How do we de-risk the switch?

Yes, this is an engineering project, and the frontend rebuild is the bulk of it. We run it end to end, from the theme build to the cutover, so it does not land on your team.

Onboarding, catalog sync, theme implementation, and strategy are fully managed, at a fraction of the cost of a re-platforming.

You prove each surface on a draft theme before it goes live, then check it against a sort-order experiment or a matched pre and post read.

Your previous theme is one revert away, so if a change hurts conversion, you put the old one back in a click.

📌 CUSTOMER PROOF PLACEHOLDER

Replace with a named Klevu-to-Layers switch quote once we have one on record. We do not have a public Klevu migration to cite yet, so this guide should not imply one. The proof below is a platform migration and a developer view, both real and used honestly.

Rainbow Shops came off Salesforce Commerce Cloud rather than Klevu, but the outcome is the one that matters here: a merchandising team that got its control back.

In the words of David Cost, their VP of eCommerce, Layers "was the first time we were able to create the kind of sort orders we were used to having in Salesforce," with "a pretty immediate impact on conversion rate."

On the frontend rebuild, Jason Hassold, Founder and Lead Developer at Negative Space, put it this way: "the SDK is easy to use and gives us the flexibility to build any search experience a merchant can imagine. The team's Shopify dev agency roots mean they actually get what dev partners need."

What Klevu does that Layers does not, and the reverse

Credit where it is due. Klevu runs strong AI search trained on years of ecommerce queries, it ships a genuinely turnkey hosted storefront UI, and it is a real Shopify-native app, not a bolt-on.

If you want search that renders itself with minimal front-end work, Klevu's hosted templates are an advantage, and we are honest that Layers asks more of your theme.

What we do that Klevu does not: we assume Shopify Plus from the ground up, in one bundle.

Real-time sync instead of a gated delta, one index for every Market, merchandising a non-engineer can run without an add-on tier, and ranking on your own revenue and return-rate metrics.

The trade-offs are real. We only serve Shopify Plus, our review volume is younger than a decade-old platform's, we do not do email or marketing personalization, and you build your storefront markup on our SDK rather than a hosted template.

If those are dealbreakers, Klevu or Athos may be the better fit, and that is fine.

What does this cost?

Klevu's published Shopify modules stack to about $1,647 a month, Site Search $649 plus Category Merchandising $549 plus Recommendations $449, with overages billed separately and enterprise pricing quoted on request.

We price on your last 12 months of collection page views and total search requests, up to 40% below legacy platforms with no six-figure floor.

Usage is uncapped with no overage charges, and all four products are bundled with no feature gating. You can see AI Search, Merchandising, and Visual Discovery working on your own catalog before you commit.

FAQs

Can I export my configuration from Klevu? Partly. Synonyms and URL redirects export as CSV, so those lift across cleanly. Boost rules, product and self-learning scores, and analytics live in the Klevu Merchant Center with no export, so they get re-authored on Layers rather than migrated.

What about the Athos migration and the 2027 sunset? That is the reason to run this comparison now. Klevu customers face a migration onto Athos's rebuilt platform on the sunset timeline regardless, so the real question is the destination, not whether to move.

Be clear-eyed that the paths differ in effort. An in-family Athos migration may carry your hosted UI and tuning forward, while moving to Layers means rebuilding the storefront UI on our SDK.

We take that build on, and we will not pretend the two migrations are identical.

Will I lose my search rankings when I switch? Not if you plan for it. Your search and collection URLs live in your Shopify theme routes, so they stay put, and we keep collection pages server-rendered with crawlable product links.

Map your redirects up front and confirm your sitemap, robots, and canonical tags are unchanged through the cutover.

Do I have to rebuild my search UI? Yes. Klevu renders your storefront search UI through its hosted templates, so moving off it means rebuilding that UI on the Layers SDK. Our team does that build as part of onboarding, and the app embed handles the plumbing with no theme code.

How long does it take, and do I need engineers? Not on your side. Theme implementation, SDK wiring, and cutover are handled by our team.

A standard theme often goes live in around a week, and a heavily customized storefront takes longer, because the frontend rebuild is the gate, not sync speed. We scope the timeline against your actual theme before you commit.

Does Layers support Shopify Markets and B2B? Yes, from a single index. Markets configuration, per-country pricing, and B2B catalogs are read natively, so adding a market is a setting, not a new index to stand up.

Ready to see it on your catalog?

We will sync your store to a draft theme, show you Layers running on your real products next to what Klevu does today, and give you the staged migration plan before you decide anything.

Book a managed migration and we will do the heavy lifting.