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Hidden product rules remove products from customer-facing surfaces without changing their status in Shopify. Each rule targets one surface — Search, Collections, or Recommendation blocks — and hides every product that matches its conditions on that surface only. Use hidden product rules when a product should stay published in Shopify (for pricing, checkout, or direct links) but should not appear in discovery. Typical cases include suppressing accessories from search, keeping legacy SKUs out of collection pages, or preventing sample products from surfacing in recommendations.

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How hidden product rules work

Each rule has:
  • A surface — the customer-facing area the rule applies to. Choose one of Search, Collections, or Recommendation blocks.
  • Conditions — a filter group built from your catalog attributes that selects the products to hide.
  • An enabled toggle — turn the rule on to apply it, or leave it as a draft while you configure conditions.
When a rule is enabled, Layers evaluates its conditions against your catalog and marks matching products as ineligible for the selected surface. Enabling, disabling, editing, or deleting a rule recomputes eligibility, so changes take effect once the recomputation completes. Hidden product rules are additive across a surface — a product is hidden from a surface when any enabled rule targeting that surface matches it. Rules never override each other, and there is no priority order.
Hidden product rules affect discovery only. Products remain published, addressable by handle, and available at checkout. To also block direct access, unpublish or archive the product in Shopify.

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Surfaces

Pick one surface per rule. Create separate rules if you need to hide the same products from more than one surface. Search hides matching products from search results and autocomplete suggestions. Collections hides matching products from collection (browse) pages. Recommendation blocks hides matching products from recommendation and product block widgets rendered outside of search and browse. Because each rule targets exactly one surface, you can hide a product from search while keeping it visible in a hand-curated collection or in “similar products” blocks — or the other way around.

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Conditions

Conditions are built with the same query-builder used elsewhere in the dashboard. You can combine any number of rules with AND / OR logic and pick from your catalog’s attributes. Fields available for conditions come from the same attribute tree used for merchandising rule filtering, so anything you can filter a merchandising rule on can also drive a hidden product rule. Common examples:
  • Attribute matching: hide products where product_type equals Accessory, or where a tag list contains internal.
  • Availability: hide products where inventory_quantity is 0 from recommendation blocks so out-of-stock items stop appearing in “you might also like.”
  • Price bounds: hide products with a price below a minimum from search to keep sample or placeholder listings out of results.
  • Vendor or brand exclusions: hide products from a specific vendor from a single surface while leaving them discoverable elsewhere.
Combine multiple conditions to narrow a rule — for example, hide from Search only when product_type = Accessory AND tags contains internal-only.

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Preview

The rule editor includes a preview panel. Pick a product from your catalog and Layers evaluates the conditions currently in the editor against that product, showing whether each condition matched and whether the rule would hide the product on the selected surface. Use preview to sanity-check a new rule before enabling it, especially when conditions combine several attributes.

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Creating a hidden product rule

  1. Open Configure → Hidden Products in the dashboard.
  2. Select Create Hidden Product Rule.
  3. Give the rule a name and, optionally, a description.
  4. Pick the surface the rule should apply to.
  5. Build the conditions that select the products to hide.
  6. Use the preview panel to confirm the rule matches the products you expect.
  7. Toggle Enabled on when you’re ready to apply the rule. Draft rules stay saved but do not affect customer-facing results.
Editing an enabled rule triggers a recomputation of product eligibility for the affected surface. Depending on catalog size, matching products may take a short time to disappear from live results after you save.

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Managing rules

The Hidden Products index page lists every rule with its name, status (Published or Draft), and surface. From the list you can:
  • Toggle a rule between enabled and disabled without editing it.
  • Open a rule to edit its name, description, surface, or conditions.
  • Delete a rule you no longer need.
Disabling a rule removes its effect immediately once eligibility recomputes; deleting a rule does the same and cannot be undone.

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Hidden products vs. request transforms

Both features can remove products from results, but they run at different times and are best suited to different use cases:
  • Hidden product rules are evaluated against your catalog and materialized per surface. They are the right choice when a set of products should always be hidden from a surface regardless of who is searching or what they typed. Because eligibility is precomputed, they have no per-request cost.
  • Request transforms run at query time. They can inject filters, override sort orders, or otherwise mutate a request based on the shopper’s context — channel, geo, customer segment, or applied filters. Reach for a request transform when the products to hide depend on the request itself. Examples include hiding web-only products from mobile-app traffic, or hiding out-of-stock items only when the shopper sorts by “Best Sellers.”
You can use both together. Hidden product rules define the baseline of what never appears on a surface; request transforms then tailor the remaining catalog to the shopper.

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See also