Linking Engine 3: Up to 99% Less Work on Every Page View
In August we made the link data your storefront downloads up to 3× lighter. Today we finish the job. The engine that finds your keywords on a page has been rebuilt from the ground up, and on every store we measured it now does its work in a fraction of the time it used to: 90% to 99% less main-thread time, with the links themselves unchanged. We believe it is the fastest keyword linking engine running on Shopify today.
🏁 The final piece of Lighter, Faster, Smarter
Every automatic link InterLinks places costs your storefront two things: the data it downloads, and the work it does to find your keywords in the page. The Performance Update in August cut the download by up to 3×. Linking Engine 3 takes on the second half, the calculation itself, and that is where most of the time was hiding.
Step 1 · August 2026
Link data re-engineered, up to 3× smaller on every page view. Done.
Step 2 · Today
The matching engine rebuilt. The cost of finding keywords no longer grows with the size of your keyword list. Shipping now.
On every live store we measured, from 3,000 to 14,000 keywords
A 180,000-word page with 10,361 links: 10 minutes down to 1.8 seconds
20 live pages checked link for link against the old engine. Identical.
What changed under the hood
The old engine was thorough but brute force. For every block of text on a page, it checked every keyword in your list, one at a time. A blog post has hundreds of text blocks. A serious keyword list has thousands of entries. Multiply the two and a single page could mean millions of checks, all of them on the shopper's device, all of them before the links appeared.
Linking Engine 3 turns that around. It builds a single index of your whole keyword list once per page, then reads each block of text exactly once, spotting every keyword as it goes. The time it takes depends on how much text is on the page, not on how many keywords you have. Forty keywords or fourteen thousand, the page is read the same way.
The numbers, on real stores
All measurements use the same method: a Pixel 5 phone profile with the CPU slowed 4×, which is how Google's own tooling simulates a mid-range mobile device. We record the longest single task the browser's main thread had to run. That is the number that decides whether a tap or a scroll feels instant or stuck.
| Page | Keywords | Old engine | Linking Engine 3 | Savings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blog article, live store | 13,878 | 4.4 s | 0.09 s | 98% |
| Product page, live store | 3,244 | 2.0 s | 0.2 s | 89% |
| Blog article, live store | 3,244 | 0.9 s | 0.13 s | 86% |
| Product page, live store | 13,612 | 2.7 s | theme-level* | ~100% |
| Stress article, 1,881 links | 15,477 | 90.5 s | 0.4 s | 99.5% |
| Stress article, 10,361 links | 15,477 | 10.3 min | 1.8 s | 99.7% |
| Lab bench, long article | 19,824 | 7.0 s | 0.07 s | 99% |
* On this store the page's longest task with InterLinks running is the same as with InterLinks blocked entirely. The remaining time belongs to the theme and other apps. Live-store figures are InterLinks' share of the longest task; stress and lab figures are the full task.
📱 Shoppers on phones
Links appear almost immediately, and the page stays responsive while they do. Taps and scrolls no longer wait on the keyword engine.
📚 Big keyword libraries
Grow your list without a second thought. Ten thousand keywords cost the page the same effort as a hundred.
🔒 Nothing to configure
Every store is already on Linking Engine 3. Your settings, your selectors, your link frequency: all honored exactly as before.
A tip of the hat 🎩
Linking Engine 3 exists because Massimiliano of maltese.beer refused to accept "that's just how it is." Running one of the largest keyword libraries on InterLinks, nearly 14,000 keywords across a beautifully written Italian craft beer blog, he opened the browser's performance tools, found the exact task that was slowing his articles on mobile, measured it, and sent us the trace with the question that mattered: can this be better?
It could. His article became our benchmark, his store became our proving ground, and every page view on every InterLinks store is faster today because he took the time to look closely and tell us what he saw.
Grazie mille, Massimiliano. Questa è per te. 🍺
Lighter. Faster. Smarter. Finished.
Two steps, two months, and the heaviest part of automatic linking now costs your shoppers almost nothing. There is no switch to flip. It is already running on your store.