# Marqo

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/marqo/  
**Website:** https://www.marqo.ai/  
**APIs profiled:** 7

Marqo is an open-source, multimodal vector search engine that lets developers index text and images, generate embeddings on the fly, and run tensor, lexical, and hybrid search through a single REST API. Built on Vespa for storage and retrieval and FastAPI for the HTTP surface, Marqo bundles model inference (Sentence Transformers, OpenCLIP, ONNX) inside the engine so a single `docker run` produces a working semantic search stack. The Apache 2.0 open-source engine has been marked deprecated by the maintainers as Marqo pivots to a hosted ecommerce search product, but the project remains widely forked, downloaded, and self-hosted, with active sibling repositories for the Python client, Terraform provider, InstantSearch client, ecommerce embedding models, and Generalised Contrastive Learning research.

## Kin Score — 36.7 / 100 (thin)

Scored 2026-08-25 under rubric 0.14.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 36.7).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 64.8 |
| Contract Quality | 49.7 |
| Governance | 0.0 |
| Contract Governance | 0.0 |
| Operational Transparency | 34.2 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 42.9 |
| Commercial Clarity | 23.7 |
| Access Clarity | 23.7 |

## Agent readiness — 21.0 (agent-aware)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | derived |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | bearer |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | documented |
| Rate Limit Signal | documented |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |
| Delegated Identity | no |
| Protected Resource Metadata | no |
| Dynamic Client Registration | no |
| Agentic Commerce | no |

## Access

Self-serve signup — onboarding: self-serve, pricing: unknown, trial: no (confidence: high).

## APIs (7)

- **Marqo Documents API** — Add, update, get, and delete documents in an index.
- **Marqo Embeddings API** — Generate embedding vectors using engine-loaded models.
- **Marqo Indexes API** — Create, list, inspect, and delete tensor / lexical indexes.
- **Marqo Models API** — Inspect, load, and eject embedding models from the engine.
- **Marqo Recommendations API** — Return documents similar to one or more reference documents.
- **Marqo Search API** — Tensor, lexical, and hybrid search across an index.
- **Marqo Telemetry API** — Health, readiness, and engine-level metadata.

## Agentic access (1)

- **Marqo Agentic Access** — 16 operations · 8 acting

## Security (2)

- **Marqo Authentication** — http · 1 scheme
- **Marqo Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DNSSEC · DMARC

## Plans (1)

- **Marqo Plans Pricing**

## Use cases (5)

- **Multimodal Semantic Search** — Index text and images into a single tensor store and query with natural-language or image inputs, with embedding inference running inside the engine.
- **Retrieval-Augmented Generation** — Power RAG pipelines by serving the nearest-neighbor retrieval layer for LLM context windows over private corpora.
- **Ecommerce Product Discovery** — Drive product search, recommendations, and merchandising-aware ranking using semantic relevance plus structured filters and boosts.
- **Visual Search** — Search product catalogs and image libraries using image-to-image and text-to-image similarity through OpenCLIP / Marqo-FashionCLIP.
- **Self-Hosted Vector Backend** — Stand up an Apache 2.0 vector search service alongside your application stack with `docker run`, no separate embedding service required.

## Tags

Vector Database, Vector Search, Multi-Modal, Semantic Search, Embeddings, Artificial Intelligence, Machine-Learning, Open-Source, Ecommerce Search

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/marqo/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.