What does the "Show products instead of variants" do when checked?

Under the hood, when you check “Show products instead of variants”, this will:

• change a specific setting on your Algolia index, [`attributeForDistinct`](attributeForDistinct API parameter) and set it to `id` (the product id)
• make every request senddistinct = true

What this does is that Algolia will deduplicate based on theidattribute, and return only one result for results that share the same value.

For a more in depth presentation of this Algolia feature, you can read the guide here:
Grouping results