Plenty of shoppers know the brand before they know the product. They arrive looking for a Bosch drill or a specific manufacturer's replacement part, and type that name straight into your search box. Since WooCommerce 9.4 folded the old Brands extension into core, every store now ships with a product_brand taxonomy, so most catalogs carry brand data.
Storing that data and searching it are two different things. The default WooCommerce search never looks at brands, so a shopper typing a brand name usually gets nothing back. For a query with such clear buying intent, that quietly costs you sales.
This guide covers what WooCommerce brands are, why the built-in search ignores them, and how to make your products findable by brand name. By the end you will have:
- Products findable by brand name. A search for "Bosch" returns every Bosch product you stock, including matches like "Bosch drill".
- Brand names and logos on every result. Shoppers see at a glance why each product matched.
- Brand pages as search results. One click to a manufacturer's full range instead of a scattering of products.
- Filters by brand. One-tap quick filter buttons on the search bar, plus rules controlling which brands appear in results at all.
Searching the brand taxonomy is an Advanced Woo Search PRO feature, so the steps below need the PRO version. If you are not ready to upgrade, there is a code-only alternative further down.
What Are Product Brands in WooCommerce
A brand in WooCommerce is a taxonomy term, exactly like a product category or a product tag. The taxonomy is registered as product_brand, and you manage its terms under Products → Brands. Each brand can carry a name, a slug, a description, and a brand image, which is usually the manufacturer logo.
Assigning a brand to a product happens in the Brands panel in the product editor sidebar. Once a product has a brand, it also appears on that brand's archive page, a ready-made listing of everything you stock from that manufacturer.
It is worth filling in the brand image and description properly while you are there. Both come back later in this guide: the image is what appears next to each product in your live search results, and the description is what makes a brand page useful when it shows up as a search result of its own.
Does WooCommerce Search Products by Brand by Default?
No, and the reason is structural rather than a setting you have missed. The default WordPress search reads three fields on each post: the title, the excerpt, and the content. Taxonomy terms are stored separately, in their own database tables, and the standard search query never joins them in.
So a search for "Bosch" returns a product only if the word "Bosch" happens to sit in that product's title or description. Everything you carefully assigned under Products → Brands is invisible to the search box. Shoppers get an empty results page for a brand you demonstrably stock.
If this sounds familiar, it is the same limitation that hides product categories and product tags from search results. Brands are simply the version of the problem that costs the most, because brand queries come from shoppers who have already decided what they want.
How to Enable Product Search by Brand in WooCommerce
Advanced Woo Search builds its own index table of your catalog and searches that instead of relying on the default WordPress query. Brand data can go into that index, which is what makes brand search possible.
To make your products searchable by brand:
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Install and activate Advanced Woo Search PRO on your store.
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Open the Index config page and tick Brand in the Data to index option. This tells the plugin that brand names belong in the index table alongside titles, descriptions, and SKUs.
Enabling Brand field for Data to Index option -
Run Reindex table and wait for it to finish.
Reindex table button -
Enable Brand in the Search in option. Indexing and searching are deliberately separate switches: step 2 put the brand data into the table, and this one tells the search to actually look at it.
Enabling Brand field for 'search in' option -
Set any other options you want while you are in the settings: more product fields to search in, what each result shows, result filters, search suggestions, and more.
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Add the search form to your store if you have not already. The simplest way is the Seamless integration option, which swaps every default search form on your site for the plugin one. You can also place a form yourself with a shortcode or the search widget.
Seamless Integration option -
Test it from the front end. Try a full brand name, a partial one such as "Bos" for "Bosch", and a brand combined with a product type such as "Bosch drill". All three should now return products.
Product search results by Brand name search
That is the whole setup. From this point on, every product you assign to a brand becomes findable by that brand name, and newly added products are indexed automatically without another manual reindex.
Searching by Brand Without the PRO Plugin
If you are not ready to upgrade, you can get a crude version of brand search with code. The snippet below hooks into the main search query, checks whether the search term exactly matches a brand name, and if it does, swaps the query for a taxonomy query on product_brand. Add it to your child theme's functions.php, a small custom plugin, or any code snippets plugin.
add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'kk_include_brands_in_search' );
function kk_include_brands_in_search( $query ) {
if ( is_admin() || ! $query->is_main_query() || ! $query->is_search() ) {
return;
}
$term = get_term_by( 'name', $query->get( 's' ), 'product_brand' );
if ( ! $term ) {
return;
}
$query->set( 'post_type', 'product' );
$query->set( 's', '' );
$query->set( 'tax_query', array(
array(
'taxonomy' => 'product_brand',
'field' => 'term_id',
'terms' => $term->term_id,
),
) );
}
It works, but be clear about what you are getting:
- Exact matches only. "Bosch" finds the brand, "Bosch drill" and "Bos" do not.
- All or nothing. When the term matches a brand, ordinary title and description matches are discarded rather than merged in.
- No relevance ranking. Results come back in whatever order the query returns them, so the closest match is not necessarily first.
- No live results. There is no AJAX dropdown, no suggestions, and no highlighting.
- It slows down as you grow. Every search runs an extra term lookup against the live database, with no index table to fall back on.
This is the same trade-off covered in our guide to WooCommerce search by SKU. Code gets you a working demo. A search index gets you something shoppers actually enjoy using.
Going Further: Display, Browse, and Filter by Brand
The steps above make your products findable by brand. The options below go further: showing brand information on the results, surfacing brand pages as results in their own right, and letting shoppers narrow a set of results down to the brands they care about.
Show the Brand Name and Image on Each Result
Open Search Results → Content in the plugin settings and enable Show product brand. Every product in your live search results then displays its brand name and brand image next to the title and price.
This does two useful things. First, it closes the loop on brand search: a shopper who typed "Bosch" can see at a glance why each result matched, instead of scanning titles and guessing. Search that explains itself feels more trustworthy. Second, it disambiguates. In catalogs where several manufacturers sell near-identical products, the brand is often the only thing separating two otherwise identical rows in a dropdown.
Show Brand Pages in Search Results
Products are not the only thing worth returning. A shopper searching for a manufacturer you carry deeply is often better served by the brand archive page than by a handful of individual products, because it gives them the full range in one place.
Open Search Results → Non-products results in the plugin settings and turn brands on. The brand term then becomes a result of its own, sitting alongside the matching products, and the brand description and image you filled in earlier are what make it look worth clicking.
The same page covers your other taxonomies. Product categories, tags, and custom taxonomies can all be surfaced as results this way, and they need switching on for the search results page as well. Our guide to displaying product category results in the search results page walks through that side of it.
Add a Quick Filter by Brand
A quick filter is a button on the search bar itself. The shopper types "drill", sees live results from every manufacturer you stock, and taps a brand button to narrow those results on the spot, without retyping anything or leaving the dropdown.
To add one:
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Go to Search Bar → Quick Filters in the plugin settings and click Add new filter.
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Set Filter Type to Multiple Filters.
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Set Filter by to Brand, then save the settings.
This suits stores with a handful of hero brands rather than a long tail, since the buttons have to fit alongside the search bar to stay useful. See also our guide to quick search buttons.
Add Search Results Filters by Brand (and More)
Search results filters work the other way round: instead of handing the shopper a control, they are rules you set for which products may appear at all. Show results only from a chosen set of brands, or drop specific brands out of search entirely while leaving them on your shop pages.
To set one up:
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Go to Search Results → Filters in the plugin settings.
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Click Filter products search results.
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Choose Product brand as the filter type, then pick the brands whose products should appear in search results. To go the other way, use the not in list condition to exclude products from specific brands completely.
Filter option with filtering rule by brand name -
Add any other filters you need on the same screen, such as price, category, stock status, or attributes.
The mechanism is the same one covered in our guides to filtering products by attribute and building filters from ACF fields, with the brand taxonomy as the source.
Weight Brand Matches Higher or Lower
Once brands are enabled for searching, they compete with titles and descriptions for relevance. Open Search Config → Search in, find the Brand field, click the gear icon next to it and change the Weight value. Raising it pushes an exact brand hit above a product that merely mentions the name somewhere in its description, which is usually what a shopper typing a manufacturer name expects.
If your product descriptions frequently name other manufacturers, for example in compatibility notes such as "fits Bosch and Makita batteries", weighting matters even more. Without it, those compatibility mentions can crowd out the products actually made by the brand.
Troubleshooting Brand Search Issues
Most brand search problems come down to one of five things:
- Nothing is returned at all. Check both switches. Brand has to be ticked under Data to index and enabled under Search in, and the table has to be reindexed after the first of those changes.
- Partial or multi-word brand names fail. Check your search settings for partial matching, make sure the misspelling fix option is enabled, and add the shortened forms your customers actually type as synonyms.
- Brand matches outrank product titles. If a search buries the products whose titles match the query under everything sharing the same brand, compare the two weights under Search Config → Search in. The Brand field weight should sit below the Title field weight.
- The brand name shows but the image does not. Either the brand term has no image set, which you fix under Products → Brands, or image display is switched off under Search Results → Non-Products Search Results → Show images.
FAQs
Does WooCommerce have built-in brands?
Yes. Since WooCommerce 9.4, brands are part of core rather than a separate extension. You will find them under Products → Brands, registered as the product_brand taxonomy, with a Brands panel in the product editor.
Can I search by brand with the free version of Advanced Woo Search?
No. Indexing and searching the brand taxonomy is a feature of Advanced Woo Search PRO. The free version still improves your store search in other ways, including synonyms and search term highlighting, but it cannot search brands.
Can I search by brand without any plugin, using code?
You can, with a pre_get_posts filter that runs a taxonomy query against product_brand. See the snippet earlier in this guide. It handles exact brand names only, with no partial matching, no relevance ranking, and no live results, so treat it as a stopgap rather than a solution.
I used the old WooCommerce Brands extension. Do my brands still work?
Yes. The extension was merged into WooCommerce core, and existing brand terms and assignments carry over to the core taxonomy. Once brands are indexed, they behave exactly the same in search.
Can I show brand pages in results instead of products?
Yes. Brand archive pages can appear as results in their own right, alongside matching products, in the same way category pages can. It works best when your brand terms have a description and an image set.
Can shoppers search by brand and product title together, like "Bosch drill"?
Yes. The brand name sits in the same index as the product title and description, so a single query can match the brand on one word and the title on another: "Bosch" finds the brand, "drill" finds the title. This is the main practical difference between a search index and the code-only approach, which only handles a bare brand name.
Can I search brands by their description?
Yes. Only the brand name is searched by default, but a one-line filter brings the brand description in too:
add_filter( 'aws_search_terms_description', function ( $search ) {
return true;
} );
Does brand search slow down a large catalog?
No. Brand names are stored in the same index table as the rest of your searchable content, so searching them costs no more than searching titles. The one operation that takes time is the initial reindex, which runs once and can be left to finish in the background.
Conclusion
Brand data sits unused in your store until something indexes it. WooCommerce gives every store the product_brand taxonomy, but its own search will never look at it, so the work you put into organizing your catalog by manufacturer is invisible to the shoppers most ready to buy.
Two settings and a reindex fix that. From there you can show brand names and logos on every result, surface brand pages as results of their own, and let shoppers filter down to the manufacturers they trust. See the full Advanced Woo Search PRO feature list and pricing, or the Brands Search documentation for the full option reference.