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Question

Why is Figma token search prioritizing seemingly irrelevant results over the obvious tokens?

  • April 8, 2026
  • 4 replies
  • 64 views
OscarLaliberteElse

I’m experiencing an new issue with token search where results don’t seem to prioritize relevant matches, particularly when trying to find semantic tokens. This behaviour seemingly out of nowhere, and I haven’t been able to revert it.

When I search within the token menu, the results appear inconsistent and often surface unrelated primitive or semantic tokens ahead of the ones that actually match my query. “Expected” is what was previously appearing for these searches.

Examples:

  • Searching “text”:
    • Expected: text/text
    • Top results: colour/gray/4 (primitive tokens)
    • Then: unrelated semantic tokens like background/surface/active, background/surface/secondary, etc.
    • The expected text semantic token appears as result 4
  • Searching “secondary”:
    • Returns multiple primitive color values (greys, blacks, creams, reds with numeric scales)
      • colour/gray/2 and colour/gray/12
      • colour/cream/2 and ​​​​​​​colour/cream/12
      • ​​​​​​​colour/red/2 and ​​​​​​​colour/red/12
      • etc...
    • Relevant semantic tokens with “secondary” appears
  • Searching “critical”:
    • Shows all shades of red first
    • Tokens labeled “critical” appear afterward
  • Searching “blue”:
    • Returns the entire spectrum of colour/teal before expected matches

Additional context:

  • This happens both when searching across all libraries and within a specific library
  • It applies across multiple keywords, not just one case
  • This behaviour started suddenly (it previously worked as expected)

What I’ve tried:

  • Logging out and back in
  • Reinstalling Figma
  • Using the “Reset Figma and restart” option

None of these resolved the issue.

Question:
Is this expected behaviour for how Figma ranks token search results, or could something be misconfigured on my end? Has anyone found a way to improve or control how results are prioritized?

    4 replies

    OscarLaliberteElse

    Here are some screenshot of how these results are displaying:

    It seems to be prioritize returning primitive tokens over semantic ones, even if the semantic token matches the search result very closely. However, this still doesn’t explain the search of “Blue” returning Teal>

    An help is greatly appreciated! This is driving me crazy!

    J
    Figmate
    • Junko3
    • Figmate
    • April 9, 2026

    Hi ​@OscarLaliberteElse, 

     

    I understand you're having an issue with searching color variables from the libraries tab, where the results are no longer prioritizing relevant matches as they did previously.

     

    Thanks for the very detailed report; it's a great help. I've just tested this on my end but haven't been able to reproduce the behavior so far.

    According to our Help Center article: Apply a color variable, you should be able to use the search bar to find color variables by their name or group. Based on that, it does sound like the tool is not working as expected in your case.
     

    Since this will require a closer look, I've gone ahead and created a support ticket (#1839532) on your behalf, including all the details you've shared here. Someone from our team will contact you directly via email through that ticket to investigate further.

     

    In the meantime, could you please check if this issue is happening only in the desktop app, or if you're seeing it in the browser as well?

    Once you've confirmed, could you please share that information by replying directly to your ticket confirmation email? This will help us consolidate all the information in one place for the investigation.

     

    Thanks!

    jordan.davies2

    I am having the same issue, been persisting for the last few days. I had set up my tokens to be able to be found by typing a few characters

     

    e.g. For “color/border/default/subtle” I could type “Bor Su”. 

    This is no longer working and I now have to scroll through a huge list of tokens to get to the right one.

      OscarLaliberteElse

      Hi ​@Junko3, thank you for your reply. 

      In the meantime, could you please check if this issue is happening only in the desktop app, or if you're seeing it in the browser as well?

      I will reply directly to the support ticket, but in the interest of visibility in all channels, this issue is persisting in browser as well.

      ​@jordan.davies2 Same here! It has really slowed me down.

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