Note: Before using this feature, you must have the merge mode enabled for crawling in your index. Please contact AddSearch support to enable this functionality, as without it, the next crawler update will overwrite any API-modified data.

Overview

This article explains how you can index your website with AddSearch crawler and use Indexing API to enrich crawled documents with additional data.

By default, updating a document with crawler or API overwrites all existing fields with new values. It also empties the fields for which no value has been provided. The merge mode allows updating specified fields without affecting others.

Merge mode is a setting that controls how updates of a document are handled. You can use it in two ways: per individual API request, or site-wide for all crawler operations. To enable merge mode for crawling, please contact the AddSearch support team at support@addsearch.com. This will ensure that crawlers do not erase custom fields that were added via Indexing API.

Update modes and parameters

When updating documents with API, you can control how the new data merges with existing document data using the standard_fields_update_mode and custom_fields_update_mode query parameters.

Each parameter accepts two values:

• update (default): Completely replaces all existing fields with new values
• merge: Preserves existing fields and only updates the fields provided in the request

Example

To update only specific custom fields while preserving existing standard fields:

PUT /v2/indices/{index public key}/documents/{document id}?standard_fields_update_mode=merge&custom_fields_update_mode=merge
{
  "custom_fields": {
    "price": 99,
    "currency": "USD"
  }
}

For more information, please visit our API guidelines.