Release 252 introduces a range of improvements across product data exports, matching accuracy, reporting, user engagement, and platform operations. This release enhances how related products are delivered via Product XML, improves the accuracy of matching statistics, expands reporting capabilities, and introduces new mechanisms to support customer retention and data quality. Alongside these user-facing enhancements, Icecat continues to invest in platform reliability, performance, and long-term maintainability through a series of behind-the-scenes improvements. For additional details, please refer to the previous Icecat Release Notes.
We have enhanced the way related products are exported in Product XML.
Related products have been available in Product XML for a long time. With this release, the export logic has been redesigned to provide more structured, relevant, and consistent results.
Related products are now grouped by relation type and processed through a filtering pipeline before being included in the export. This helps ensure that only eligible and relevant relations are delivered to consuming systems.
Instead of handling related products as a single collection, the export now organizes relations into dedicated groups based on their relation type.
Supported groups include:
The export preserves a consistent ordering of relation groups:
As typification coverage is still being completed, the export supports both typified and non-typified relations.
Relations without a relation type continue to be exported during the transition period, ensuring continuity for existing integrations.
Relations marked as Invalid are excluded from export.
Before related products are exported, they pass through a filtering pipeline that evaluates whether each relation is eligible for export.
The filtering process includes:
The filtering order is applied consistently across all requests to ensure predictable results.
Related products that have passed their End-of-Life date are automatically excluded from export.
The filtering logic evaluates locale-specific EOL dates and falls back to INT content when required.
This helps prevent discontinued products from appearing in related product recommendations.
For selected users participating in distributor catalog filtering, only related products that exist within the assigned distributor catalog are exported.
If a related product is not available in the applicable catalog, it is excluded from the export.
Export limits are now applied independently for each relation type group.
By default, up to 500 related products can be exported per relation type. The limit can be customized using the relations_limit query parameter available in Product XML requests.
The maximum number of related products exported per relation type can be controlled with the relations_limit query parameter.
If the parameter is not specified, the default limit of 500 related products per relation type is applied.
Examples:
https://data.icecat.biz/xml_s3/xml_server3.cgi?lang=EN&icecat_id=122989465&output=productxml&relations_limit=50
This request returns up to 50 related products per relation type.
https://data.icecat.biz/export/freexml/EN/122989465.xml?relations_limit=10
This request returns up to 10 related products per relation type.
The limit is applied independently to each relation type group after all filtering rules have been executed. If more relations are available than the specified limit, only the highest-ranked relations are included in the export.
This enhancement improves the quality and relevance of related product data delivered through Product XML by:
The updated related products export is available via Product XML and automatically applies to all supported Product XML requests.
We have improved the calculation of the described product statistics displayed in Icecat.biz Matching.
The update ensures greater consistency between matching statistics and the actual products available through matching outputs and related exports.
The calculation of the described products has been refined to align with the actual product quality assigned to matched products.
A product is now considered described only when:
Unmatched products and products at other quality levels are excluded from the product statistics described.
Matching results now provide a more reliable count of described products, helping users better understand the quality and coverage of their matched catalog.
The Unique described products statistic displayed in the matching results has also been simplified to show only the product count.
These improvements reduce confusion when comparing matching statistics with generated output files and provide a more accurate representation of catalog enrichment coverage.
Users can make decisions based on statistics that more closely reflect the actual matching results.
Icecat continuously monitors automated traffic accessing its content. As AI-powered search engines and large language models become increasingly important sources of Icecat platform discovery, understanding how automated crawlers interact with Icecat content is essential.
To support informed access management decisions, Icecat conducted a comprehensive analysis of logs to identify AI-related crawlers, classify their purpose, and update crawler access policies accordingly.
The objective of this initiative is to establish a transparent and controlled approach to AI crawler access by distinguishing between training crawlers and search-oriented crawlers.
This allows Icecat to:
Logs were analyzed to identify automated traffic generated by AI-related services.
Detected crawlers were classified into two categories:
The analysis also included measurements of request volume to better understand crawler activity and to prioritize access policy decisions.
The following crawler categories were identified as AI training or dataset collection crawlers and are now subject to blocking policies:
The following crawlers were classified as search and retrieval crawlers and remain allowed:
These crawlers help users discover Icecat content through traditional search engines and AI-powered search experiences.
Based on the crawler classification results, Icecat updated its robots.txt configuration to reflect the approved access policy.
The update included:
Some crawlers are known to ignore robots.txt directives.
For these cases, additional infrastructure-level protection measures may be required, including firewall or WAF rules.
This applies particularly to Bytespider. This protection complements robots.txt and helps enforce crawler access policies more effectively.
Crawler ecosystems evolve rapidly, and new crawler identities regularly appear.
During the investigation, additional crawler identifiers were discovered after previous access rules had already been applied, demonstrating the importance of continuous monitoring and periodic review of crawler classifications.
Icecat will continue monitoring crawler activity and updating access policies when new AI-related crawlers emerge or existing crawler behavior changes.
Icecat has introduced automated inactivity notifications for Channel partners as part of the Churn Signals initiative.
The new functionality helps identify inactive users and automatically encourages them to return to the platform through targeted email reminders. By proactively reaching out to disengaged users, Icecat can improve user retention and provide account managers with better visibility into potentially at-risk accounts.
User inactivity is often an early indicator of churn.
By automatically notifying users when they become inactive, Icecat can:
The notification process is integrated with Icecat’s user activity monitoring system.
Users progress through activity-based statuses such as:
In this release, inactivity notifications are triggered only for users who reach the Inactive status.
Newly registered users are not contacted immediately.
Users remain in the Onboarding stage during their initial onboarding period and do not receive inactivity reminders during this time. This prevents unnecessary notifications while users are still becoming familiar with the platform.
A user becomes eligible for an inactivity reminder when:
Once these conditions are met, the notification process runs automatically without requiring manual intervention.
Before sending a notification, Icecat verifies the user’s email subscription preferences.
Users who have opted out of email communications do not receive inactivity reminders, while those who remain subscribed continue to receive notifications.
Notifications are delivered in the user’s preferred language whenever available.
If a preferred language version is unavailable, the system automatically falls back to English. This ensures a consistent experience for users across supported locales.
The system continuously monitors user activity after a notification is sent.
When a user returns and resumes activity:
If the user becomes inactive again in the future, a new inactivity cycle begins, and a new reminder may be sent.
This release focuses exclusively on Channel partners.
Support for additional user groups may be introduced in future phases as the Churn Signals initiative evolves.
The automated inactivity notification framework provides:
By combining activity monitoring with automated communication, Icecat can proactively support user engagement and reduce the risk of customer churn.
To improve product-matching coverage across imports and matching processes, a set of distributor-specific brand mappings has been consolidated into common brand mappings.
This change allows the same brand resolution logic to be reused across multiple distributors rather than being limited to a single import source.
Qualified distributor-specific brand mappings have been converted into common mappings.
As a result:
Duplicate mapping rules created by the promotion process have been automatically cleaned up to ensure a consistent mapping structure.
By making selected mappings available globally, Icecat can:
This enhancement helps ensure that successful brand resolutions benefit the wider ecosystem rather than remaining limited to a single distributor.
Coverage reports generated through the Coverage from File tool now include the name of the originally uploaded source file in the generated report name.
This improvement makes it easier to identify and organize exported reports, especially when working with multiple files and recurring coverage analyses.
Previously, generated reports used technical file names, making it difficult to identify the source file that had been processed.
Report names now follow a more descriptive format:
<source_filename>_coverage_report_YYYY_MM_DD_hh_mm_ss
The original uploaded file name is included in both the downloaded reports and the reports delivered by email.
To ensure compatibility and reliability, report names are automatically validated:
This enhancement improves report traceability and reduces the time required to locate reports associated with specific uploads.
Users can now immediately identify which source file was used to generate a particular coverage report.
As part of Release 252, Icecat delivered a series of technical debt-reduction and maintenance initiatives to improve platform stability, performance, scalability, and long-term maintainability.
While these improvements are largely invisible to end users, they help ensure a more reliable experience and provide a stronger foundation for future product development.
Several backend processes have been optimized to improve processing efficiency and reduce the time required for data updates and content delivery.
These improvements help:
Multiple maintenance activities aimed at improving the reliability of data processing and synchronization across Icecat services.
Several API-related enhancements were introduced to improve scalability and ensure consistent behavior across services.
These changes help maintain reliable performance as usage continues to grow and make future API development easier and more sustainable.
The front-end codebase received several maintenance improvements aimed at reducing technical complexity and increasing consistency.
Benefits include:
Ongoing platform maintenance activities were completed to improve the overall health of the Icecat ecosystem.
These initiatives strengthen the underlying platform by:
Additional validation, monitoring, and operational improvements were implemented to further enhance platform quality and reliability.
These efforts help Icecat identify potential issues earlier and maintain a high level of service quality as the platform continues to evolve.
Although most of these changes operate behind the scenes, they contribute directly to:
Icecat remains committed to continuous investment in platform quality, ensuring customers benefit from a stable, scalable, and reliable product experience.
In Release 252, Icecat focused on delivering more accurate data, greater transparency, and a stronger platform foundation. Customers benefit from enhanced related-product exports, more reliable matching statistics, improved reporting capabilities, better coverage management, and automated user-engagement workflows. At the same time, ongoing investments in performance, reliability, and maintainability help ensure a stable and scalable platform that can continue to support future growth and innovation.
Want to get more value from Related Products?
Release 252 introduces new capabilities that allow related products to be filtered by assigned distributor catalogs, helping to deliver more relevant recommendations and product relationships. If you would like to explore how these capabilities can be configured for your organization, please contact your Icecat Account Manager.
Read further: Icecat, e-commerce, ecommerce, Icecat, product content, release notes
