Help Me Understand How To Get Jetpack Search to Search a Custom Post Type

"public" => true,
"publicly_queryable" => true,
"exclude_from_search" => false,Code language: PHP (php)

function allow_my_post_types($allowed_post_types) {
  $allowed_post_types[] = "YOUR_CPT_SLUG";
  return $allowed_post_types;
}
add_filter("rest_api_allowed_post_types", "allow_my_post_types");Code language: PHP (php)

I’ve got a Custom Post Type in WordPress. It’s called docs because it’s for documentation pages.

register_post_type("docs", [
    "labels" => [
        "name" => __("Docs"),
        "singular_name" => __("Docs Page"),
        "add_new" => __("Add Docs Page"),
        "add_new_item" => __("Add New Docs Page"),
        "edit_item" => __("Edit Docs Page"),
    ],
    "public" => true,
    "publicly_queryable" => true,
    'exclude_from_search' => false,
    "has_archive" => true,
    "rewrite" => ["slug" => "docs"],
    "show_in_rest" => true,
    "hierarchical" => true,
    "supports" => [
        "title",
        "editor",
        "thumbnail",
        "excerpt",
        "page-attributes",
        "revisions",
    ],
]);Code language: PHP (php)

This is for the CodePen 2.0 Docs.

The Classic Docs are just “Pages” in WordPress, and that works fine, but I thought I’d do the correct WordPress thing and make a unique kind of content a Custom Post Type. This works quite nicely, except that they don’t turn up at all in Jetpack Search.

I like Jetpack Search. It works well. It’s got a nice UI. You basically turn it on and forget about it. I put it on CSS-Tricks, and they still use it there. I put it on the Frontend Masters blog. It’s here on this blog. It’s a paid product, and I pay for it and use it because it’s good. I don’t begrudge core WordPress for not having better search, because raw MySQL search just isn’t very good. Jetpack Search uses Elasticsearch, a product better-suited for full-blown site search. That’s not a server requirement they could reasonably bake into core.

But the fact that it just doesn’t index Custom Post Types is baffling to me. I suspect it’s just something I’m doing wrong.

I can tell it doesn’t work with basic tests. For example, I’ve got a page called “Inline Block Processing” but if you search for “Inline Block Processing” it returns zero results.

In the Customizing Jetpack Search area, I’m specifically telling Jetpack Search not to exclude “Docs”. That very much feels like it will include it.

I’ve tried manually reindexing a couple of times, both from SSHing into Pressable and using WP-CLI to reindex, and from the “Manage Connections” page on WordPress.com. No dice.

I contacted Jetpack Support, and they said:

Jetpack Search handles Custom Post Types individually, so it may be that the slug for your post type isn’t yet included in the Jetpack Search index.
 
We have a list of slugs we index here:
 
https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/blob/trunk/projects/packages/sync/src/modules/class-search.php#L691
 
If the slug isn’t on the list, please submit an issue here so that our dev team can add it:

Where they sent me on GitHub was a bit confusing. It’s the end of a variable called private static $unindexed_postmeta, which doesn’t seem quite right, as that seems like, ya know, post metadata that shouldn’t be indexed, which isn’t what’s going on here. But it’s also right before a variable called private static $taxonomies_to_sync, which feels closer, but I know what a taxonomy is, and this isn’t that. A taxonomy is categories, tags, and stuff (you can make your own), but I’m not using any custom taxonomies here; I’m using a Custom Post Type.

They directed me to open a GitHub Issue, so I did that. But it’s sat untouched for a month.

I just need to know whether Jetpack Search can handle Custom Post Types. If it does, what am I doing wrong to make it not work? If it can’t, fine, I just wanna know so I can figure out some other way to handle this. Unsearchable docs are not tenable.