Smart Search for Confluence

Live lists of pages, built from plain conditions.

Getting started

Edit a page, type /Smart Search and pick the macro.
Publish. The list appears straight away, showing recent pages from this space.
To narrow it down, open the macro settings and choose your conditions.

The list is live. When a page is updated, renamed or deleted, the list reflects that on its own — you never edit it again.

What it is for

Finding what everyone forgot

Set Last updated → Not touched for → 180 days and pick a space. You get every page in that space nobody has opened in half a year: outdated policies, dead projects, instructions for systems that no longer exist.

This is the reason most people install the app. Confluence search finds a page when you know what you want. It cannot answer "what are we no longer maintaining?"

A review page that never goes stale

Put the macro on a page called "Needs review", set the conditions once, and it stays accurate for years without anyone maintaining it.

An index by label

Type a label such as onboarding and get every page carrying it — a table of contents that builds itself as your team adds pages.

What the team published recently

Set Updated within → 30 days for a status page or a team home page.

Settings

Setting	What it does
Space	Limit to one space, or search everywhere you have access to.
Content type	Pages, blog posts, or both.
Labels	Comma separated. A page must carry all of them.
Last updated	Not touched for N days, or updated within N days.
Words in the text	Plain words to look for inside pages.
Sort by	Recently updated, oldest first, title, recently created.
Show	How many results to display, up to 50.

Writing the query yourself

Under the conditions there is a Search query section. It shows the query the app built for you. Tick Write the query myself to edit it directly — useful if you already know CQL and need something the dropdowns do not cover.

What people see

Above the list, readers see in plain English what it contains — for example, "Pages, in HR, not updated for over 180 days". Nobody has to guess where the list came from.

Permissions and what people can see

The list respects Confluence permissions. Each reader sees only the pages they are allowed to see — the same list can look different for different people, and that is correct behaviour.

Known limits

Confluence returns results in batches; the "Show more" button loads the next one. For very large sets, narrowing the conditions is still faster than paging.
Labels are combined with AND: a page must carry all of them, not any.
Search covers what Confluence search indexes; very recent edits may take a minute to appear.

Replacing an app that is going away

Atlassian is retiring the Connect platform, and apps built on it stop working during 2026–2027. If you built your page lists with one of them:

Replacing CQL Search — last updated July 2024, around 1000 installations. How to carry your queries over.
Connect end of life, in plain words — how to check which of your apps are affected.

Support

Write to support@horizonventures.app. Include your Confluence site address and the conditions you set — it makes finding the cause much faster.