When sorting changes the order of your results, the most common cause is that the sorted index is using exhaustive sorting.
With exhaustive sorting, Algolia orders results primarily by the chosen sort attribute, such as price or date. Relevance still exists, but it only helps break ties between records that have the same sort value. This means that if many records have different values for the sort attribute, the sort can dominate the final order and the results may appear less relevant.
This behavior is expected with a standard replica, which is used for exhaustive sorting. If you want to keep strong relevance while still applying a sorting preference, review whether your setup should use relevant sorting with a virtual replica instead.
Also confirm that the attribute you’re sorting on is appropriate for sorting. Algolia recommends sorting only on numeric or boolean attributes.
To investigate further, use the relevance troubleshooting guide to review ranking behavior in the Dashboard and with ranking information from the API: Troubleshooting relevance