Fetchie is polite about your search page. If your theme would be showing its default search results, Fetchie steps in with its own ranked, snippet-rich page. If you’ve built a search results template — in a page builder or a custom theme — Fetchie stays out of the way, automatically. This page explains how that decision works and how to get Fetchie’s results into your own layout.
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When Fetchie Renders Its Own Page
With the Google-style results page feature on (it’s on by default — Tracksies > Settings > Features), Fetchie takes over the standard search URL (?s=) and renders a clean, theme-wrapped results page: heading, result count, search form, ranked results with snippets and jump links, pagination. Your theme’s header and footer wrap it, and the colours come from your Designer brand settings.
The takeover only happens when the alternative would have been your theme’s default search template. Fetchie fills a gap; it never fights a layout you built.
Turn the feature off and Fetchie leaves the search page entirely to your theme — the index and Insights keep working regardless.
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When Your Own Template Wins
Page builders assign custom search-results templates through the same WordPress mechanism Fetchie uses, and Fetchie checks for them before doing anything:
- A builder plugin’s search template (Elementor Pro and friends) is detected by where the template file lives, and Fetchie yields to it automatically
- Bricks templates are detected natively — Bricks works differently under the hood, and Fetchie specifically checks whether a Bricks search template is assigned to the request before stepping in
No setting to flip, no conflict to untangle: build a search template in your builder and it wins.
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Handing Your Template the Real Results
Here’s the catch with a custom search template: the builder’s own results loop only knows about WordPress’s native search, so your beautiful layout would show the old date-ordered results. The [fetchie_results] shortcode fixes that — drop it into your template and it renders Fetchie’s ranked results, snippets, jump links, and pagination right there.
[fetchie_results]By default the shortcode renders just the results — no heading, no count, no search form — because a builder template usually owns those pieces already. If you’d like Fetchie to supply them, switch each one on:
[fetchie_results heading="1" count="1" form="1"]heading="1"— adds a “Search results for …” heading. It renders as an h2, since your template’s page heading is presumably the h1count="1"— adds the “N results” lineform="1"— adds a search form that submits to the standard search URL
The shortcode only renders on an actual search page with a non-empty query; anywhere else it stays silent, so it’s safe to leave sitting in a template.
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The Look
Whether Fetchie renders the whole page or just the shortcode’s results, the styling is the same: layout and breadcrumb options from Results appearance, colours and corner rounding from your Designer brand settings, and typography inherited from your theme so the results feel native to your site.
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For Developers
One advanced escape hatch: the fetchie_take_over_search_template filter receives Fetchie’s take-over decision and the resolved template path, so edge cases — a theme serving templates from an unusual location, or a builder-as-theme Fetchie doesn’t detect natively — can force the decision either way.
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Related
- How search results work — what the rendered results contain
- Results appearance — plain list vs cards
- Getting started — building the index the results draw from