Site search is a hospitality business

15 years ago, I had a dream to visit the Top 50 Restaurants in the World. It was an excuse to travel and eat delicious things while watching world-class hospitality unfold (three of my favorite things at once).

My first stop was Le Bernardin, right here at home.

As I settled into a corner table for a many-course meal I very much could not afford, I noticed something interesting. A group of six was seated across from me, dressed to the nines, comfortably middle-aged. As they scanned their menus, the maître d' approached with a small cigar box. He quietly opened it just under table height next to one of the men, who visibly grinned as he brought out a pair of reading glasses. The entire table was delighted and quickly asked for their own pairs to read in the dim lighting.

My love for hospitality was set, alongside a rule I think about to this day: hospitality isn't about delivering great service. It's about making people feel seen and valued, about anticipating needs, and going just a little bit further than feels reasonable.

For too long, we've treated site search as a technical feature. A box in the corner to be optimized for conversion rates. Something users resort to when other navigation fails.

But anyone searching your site is raising their hand. They're not browsing or killing time. They have a specific need, and they want help from you specifically. These are your highest-intent visitors. The people most likely to subscribe, donate, share your work, come back again and again.

And most organizations are failing them.

While site search ranks among the top three most important website features, 72% of sites completely fail user expectations and 12% of users bounce to another site as a result (Algolia). These high-intent users leave. They lose confidence you have the answer. They go to Google instead—and with AI summaries now intercepting those clicks, they may never make it back to you.

I never set out to create a search company, but I kept coming back to a value I hold dear: access to information is power. But with an endless sea of information, access isn't enough. You need expertise. You need hospitality. That's why we built Dewey - to provide expert-driven AI search, with hospitality at its core.

When someone searches your site, they fall into one of two categories. Some know exactly what they need. They're looking for a specific article they read last month. A particular data point. A reference they want to cite. For these users, retrieval is the goal (and it's table stakes for search).

But many more don't know exactly what they're looking for. They have a question. A need. A half-formed idea. They're not searching for a specific post - they're looking to discover how you can help. Like the parent searching “stress” with Dr. Lisa Damour who is really looking to understand how to help a teen through the stress of college admissions.

Have you ever worked with a great research librarian? They don't just retrieve information. They understand what you really need, even when you can't articulate it. They don't just hand you the first thing you ask for. They dig deeper and show you adjacent resources. That's what great search should do: understand intent, show unexpected connections, guide users to questions they didn't know to ask.

They need the reading glasses in the cigar box.

Site search is so notoriously bad that many users have been using a Google hack for years: “yourdomain.com + their search query” typed directly into Google.

That’s not ok anymore.

Google's AI summaries mean those clicks never arrive. The shift is dramatic: when users see AI summaries, only 9% click through to the source website. That’s a 60% drop compared to traditional search results (Pew Research). Your content becomes raw material for someone else's answer, not a destination in its own right.

Today, you must credibly compete on your own turf. Not by matching Google or ChatGPT feature-for-feature—that's a losing game. By doing what they can't: delivering your specific expertise, in your brand voice, with your values, building relationships with people who choose to come to you. By understanding your users deeply and anticipating their needs in a way that surprises and delights.

When search centers on hospitality, your entire archive comes alive. All that expertise you've built over years - the articles, the research, the guides, the deep work - becomes accessible at scale. The foundational piece from 2018 that perfectly answers today's question. The nuanced analysis from last spring that connects two ideas. The practical guide buried five clicks deep that solves the exact problem someone's facing right now.

Great discovery activates your archives. It multiplies the value of work you've already done. And it frees you to focus on net-new content instead of constantly refreshing old topics to keep them visible.

And it gives you something else: data.

Search logs have always been a critical tool to understand your users, but when the experience is flat so is the data. Instead of a list of keywords, imagine a rich set of questions and follow-ups. These logs reveal what people really want to know from you. And not just what they'll ask in public on social media—what they actually need, when the stakes are high. For Spotlight PA, the Dewey logs surfaced foundational civics questions voters weren't asking in public: "What does a judge do?" "Does my vote really matter?" For ParentData, Dewey’s data revealed sensitive topics that wouldn't come up in public forums: questions about psychedelics while breastfeeding, deep anxieties about being a parent, fears about the impact of day-to-day household decisions.

That's incredible signal. You learn what resonates and what is trending. But even more critically, you learn what to create next. This is high-signal data in a world of noise. Your users are telling you precisely where they need help. All you have to do is listen.

We're at a turning point in how knowledge flows. The old model - create expertise, publish it, hope Google sends people to you - is broken. AI intermediaries are stepping in between experts and their audiences, extracting value, stripping attribution, offering summaries instead of relationships.

The alternative is to build the information ecosystem we actually need: one where expertise is accessible on the expert's terms. Where your work remains yours. Where people can find what they need in your voice, with your guidance, building trust with you directly.

That requires treating search not as a technical afterthought but as an act of hospitality. Meeting people where they are. Understanding what they need before they can fully articulate it. Anticipating their next question. Showing them what you can do.

Handing them the reading glasses before they realize they need them.

That's the ecosystem worth building.