Smart Search for Confluence → replacing CQL Search

Looking for a CQL Search alternative

Keep your live page lists working — without writing CQL.

What is happening to CQL Search

CQL Search lets you put a live list of pages into a Confluence page by writing a CQL query. It has around 1000 installations. Its last update was July 2024, and it is built on Connect — the platform Atlassian is retiring through 2026 and 2027.

What breaks and when. Not on an announced date. Connect macros degrade: the list renders on some pages, then stops. On a documentation page that is cosmetic. On a review dashboard that a team actually works from, it is a process quietly failing with nobody informed.

What you lose, and what you keep

What you had	After it stops
Live list of pages on a page	Gone — the macro no longer renders
Your CQL queries	Stored in the page as macro parameters. Not lost, but you have to open each page to read them out
The pages themselves	Untouched. This app never stored your content, only queries

Before anything breaks, list the pages that use it. Confluence advanced search understands macro = "cql-search". Do this while the macro still renders — it is much harder to reconstruct intent from a broken page.

Smart Search — the same job, without the query language

Built on Forge, so the end-of-life problem does not apply. Same idea: a block on the page showing a live list of documents that updates itself.

The main difference: you do not write CQL

CQL Search assumed you know the query language. That is fine for the person who set it up and useless for everyone else — which is why these lists rot: the one person who could edit them left the company.

Smart Search builds the query from checkboxes and dropdowns: pick a space, pick labels, "not touched for N days", words in the text, sort order. It shows you in plain English what the list will contain before you save it.

CQL is still there for those who want it. There is a manual mode where you paste a query directly — so your existing CQL from the old macro can be carried over as-is. Nothing forces you to rebuild it with checkboxes.

What else it does

Feature	Detail
Excerpts	A line of text from each document, so you can tell which one you want without opening it
Grouping	By space, by who edited last, or by month — a flat list of forty pages is unreadable
Show more	Confluence returns results in batches; the button loads the next one
Works out of the box	Dropped on a page with no configuration, it shows the recently updated documents of that space instead of an empty "please configure me" screen
Permissions	The list is built as the person reading it. Nobody sees a page they could not already open
Where it runs	In the reader's browser, on your own site. Runs on Atlassian — no vendor servers involved

The thing these lists are actually best at

Finding documents nobody has touched in years. Every large wiki has hundreds of them, and nobody knows which — that is the whole problem. A list built on "in this space, not updated for 365 days, sorted oldest first" turns an unknowable mess into a work queue, and it keeps itself current.

How to move

Install Smart Search. Both apps can be installed at once.
Find your pages with macro = "cql-search" in advanced search.
On each page, open the old macro, copy the query, add the new macro and paste it into manual mode. Or rebuild it with checkboxes — usually faster.
Check the list looks right, remove the old macro.

What it costs

Free for teams up to 10 people. Above that, $1 per user per month.

Questions before you move

Send your CQL query to support@horizonventures.app and we will tell you whether it works as-is. We would rather say "this one does not fit" than have you find out after installing.