The Algolia engine does not support negative scores for optional filters, as filter scores are integer values from 0 to 65,535. If you've added an optionalFilter with a negative score, expecting it to bury matching records at the bottom of search results, it won't work.
Any negative value is silently replaced with the default score of 1 during parsing. This means the filter is applied, but has no boosting or burying effect — ranking falls through to the next tiebreaker (often a custom ranking attribute), which is usually why the affected records still rank higher than expected.
Solution
To bury records instead of boosting them, use the negation syntax on the filter itself, rather than assigning it a negative score.
❌ Won't work — negative score:
optionalFilters: ["attribute:value<score=-10>"]
✅ Works — negated filter:
optionalFilters: ["attribute:-value"]
You can combine multiple negated values:
optionalFilters: [ "attribute:-value1", "attribute:-value2" ]