Shutterstock unlocks 23% increase in search satisfaction with Marqo

Shutterstock / Envato (a Shutterstock Company) is a leading global creative ecosystem offering high-quality digital assets including website templates, video, audio, graphics, and plugins to designers, developers, marketers, and content creators. It is a subsidiary of Shutterstock, serving approximately 30% of all Shutterstock users. With a library of over 10 million assets and a worldwide community of contributors and customers, Envato powers creative projects in over 200 countries through its marketplaces, API integrations, and subscription services.

The company's search experience is mission-critical, acting as the first and most frequent touchpoint for customers as they source creative content for websites, videos, branding, and other digital productions.

Envato partnered with Marqo to modernize content discovery across its global creative marketplace. By replacing keyword-heavy search with Marqo's AI-native, multimodal engine, Envato introduced an intent-aware discovery experience that understands how creatives think, search, and evaluate visual content at scale.

Marqo brought semantic and visual understanding across images, video, vectors, and AI-generated assets, allowing search to interpret natural language queries, creative concepts, and stylistic intent rather than relying on exact keyword matches.

Conceptual and Abstract Queries — Difficulty handling conceptual or abstract queries meant creative professionals could not find assets by mood, style, or thematic intent using natural language.

Engagement Signal Visibility — Missing session metrics, category IDs, and clear collection names made performance analysis and search-logic refinement difficult.

Relevance at Scale — Maintaining consistent relevance quality across a library of over 10 million assets required manual curation that could not scale.