Date Bucketing for Sort Orders
Date attributes in sort orders — created_at, published_at, updated_at, and similar — now have an optional Bucket control: No bucket, Hour, Day, Week, Month, Quarter, or Year. Picking a bucket rounds each product's date down to the start of that period before it's used in sorting.
This matters most for stores that launch many products in the same short window. Raw timestamps make every product's date unique, so a date attribute used as a tiebreaker can end up reshuffling the primary order instead of just breaking true ties. Rounding to Day, Week, or Month groups same-period products together so the earlier sort expression stays in control. The same bucket also applies wherever that date attribute feeds a weighted group or a soft boost base value.
Leave Bucket on No bucket to keep sorting on exact timestamps, same as before.