Why is Website Search Broken and How Can We Fix It?
Direct Answer
Website search is often broken due to its reliance on traditional keyword-based search technologies, which fail to understand user intent and provide relevant results. To fix this, websites need to adopt AI-powered chatbots that can interpret user queries more intelligently and deliver precise answers based on the content.
Detailed Explanation
Browsing through a website can sometimes feel like wandering through a supermarket: if you're not familiar with it, it can take forever to find what you're looking for. You know the information is there, but finding it can be frustrating.
Unlike the supermarket, at least websites have search bars. But your good old search bar, while practical and long-standing, often delivers a bunch of links to anything related to your keywords—not to mention anything related to your intent.
The Problem with Keyword Search
Traditional search technologies rest on keyword matching. The user enters keywords, and the search engine retrieves content containing those keywords. But this simplicity is also its downfall.
Why Keyword Search Fails Users
- Users must know the "right" keywords: Not all users know exactly what they're looking for, or the terminology used on your website
- Results lack relevance filtering: Keyword search returns everything containing the term—including content that's years old and completely outdated
- No intent understanding: The engine can't discern why users are searching, just what words they typed
- Information overload: Hundreds or thousands of results, leaving users to figure out which is most pertinent
- Poor accessibility: Sifting through blue links is frustrating for everyone—and nearly impossible with a screen reader
This is especially problematic for websites with time-sensitive content: schools, museums, conference producers, tech companies with evolving features and system requirements.
→ The result: Many websites have stopped incorporating a search bar altogether. Others keep one, but no one uses it.
The Decline of Website Search
This decline hurts both users and website owners:
- Users are frustrated and may miss important content that could answer their queries
- Website owners spend resources creating content, only to lose the opportunity to engage visitors
Add to this that content is scattered across different formats—pages, blog posts, social media, multimedia, podcasts—and you understand why users turn to ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI mode instead.
But if users don't come to your website anymore, you might as well roll down the curtain.
The Solution: AI-Powered Search
Websites need to provide an experience that's better than what AI portals provide. Users love ChatGPT, so that's the baseline experience they now expect everywhere—but one that's the most up-to-date expert on your content.
What Users Actually Want
- No requirement to know your jargon
- No data dump of links from years ago
- A system that understands their language and maps their intent to your content
Modern AI-powered search solves this through RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) technology:
- Retrieves relevant content from your website using vector embeddings
- Generates accurate answers grounded in that content
- Delivers direct answers—no blue links, no sifting through outdated results
→ ROZZ's approach: Indexes all website content in Pinecone, understanding user intent semantically rather than just matching keywords. When a visitor asks a question, it retrieves the most relevant content pieces and generates a direct answer.
The Curation Challenge
When choosing a chatbot, the most important consideration is: how much effort do you want to put into curating it?
Think about all the content accumulated on your website over the years—hundreds or thousands of pages no one has ever bothered to remove. Who's going to tell your bot which ones to keep?
This is where automation becomes critical. ROZZ addresses this by:
- Automatically filtering and moderating content through its GEO pipeline
- Using quality thresholds and deduplication
- Ensuring only relevant, high-quality content powers chatbot responses
- Handling the entire curation process automatically
The Virtuous Cycle
Beyond fixing on-site search, there's an additional benefit: every question asked through an AI chatbot represents real user intent—data that traditional keyword search never captured.
ROZZ logs these questions and feeds them into its GEO optimization pipeline, generating AI-optimized Q&A pages that help your content get discovered across:
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Perplexity
- Google AI Overviews
This creates a virtuous cycle: better on-site search → more engaged visitors → more questions → more discoverable content → more visitors.
The Bottom Line
Websites need their own AI chatbot or they will be bypassed by AI platforms—or die of irrelevance and user frustration.
Google used to send visitors to websites as fast as they could. Times have changed, and now Google wants to keep those eyeballs on their own property.
The future of the web is in play right now. Take it into your own hands.
Originally posted September 16, 2025