Optimizely
December 09, 2025
John Abbasi
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If 2024 was the year people tried AI-first search, 2025 was the year they started to expect it everywhere.
Google’s AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT trained visitors to show up with a new baseline: don’t make me click five times, don’t make me guess the right keywords, just answer the question like you understand what I mean. As a result, visitors bring those expectations straight to your website’s search bar.
At SearchStax, we’ve taken a practical stance: move fast, use AI where it measurably improves discovery and keep humans in control so brands can keep the site search experience accurate and on-brand. That practical framework shaped a lot of our biggest moments this year.
The New Visitor Behavior: Questions Beat Keywords
The biggest shift isn’t a new AI model release or a shiny UI. It’s how people type.
Instead of “tuition deadline,” they search, “When is the tuition deadline for fall semester?” Or, “what happens if I miss the tuition deadline?” Instead of “flu symptoms,” it’s “what should I do if I have a fever for 3 days and a sore throat?”
A few things are happening at once:
People are writing full questions because they’ve seen that modern search can handle them. They’ve become accustomed to instant, summarized answers, not a list of links that may or may not hold the answer they seek. They assume intent matters more than exact phrasing.
And here’s the kicker, visitors don’t reset their expectations when they land on your site. They don’t think, “This is an institutional website, I should search like it’s 2016.” They search like it’s 2025.
Onsite search is no longer competing with other onsite search. It’s competing with the mental model created by the broader AI search experience.
Our Direct Response: Smart Answers
We saw the shift in search behavior early and knew we had to move quickly. It was clear that this visitor behavior wasn’t a temporary trend; it was an evolution of the status quo.
Smart Answers is designed to meet that new expectation at the point of need; when someone asks a question, it delivers a clear, natural-language summary at the top of the results page.
The practical AI difference is the part that matters most. Smart Answers generates responses based on your indexed content inside SearchStax Site Search, not the open web. That means the system is working from the same source of truth your teams already maintain, rather than pulling in content and answers that are out of your control from across the internet. This empowers website experience owners to deliver answers with accuracy and value for both visitors who know what they are looking for and others who need to explore.
For trust-sensitive industries like healthcare and higher ed, this approach is the difference between helpful and risky. When the content is yours, governed by your process, you can be confident the experience matches what your organization is willing to stand behind.
Beyond the Obvious: Understanding Intent With Smart Ranking
Once visitors start asking better questions, they also start searching in a more nuanced way. Same words, different intent.
“Apply” on a university site might mean apply to a program, apply for financial aid, apply a payment, apply to graduate. On a healthcare site it could mean applying a topical medication, applying for a job, applying for coverage.
That’s where Smart Ranking comes in. It’s built to reorder results to better match your visitors’ search intent so the most attractive results rise to the top.
And yes, users have seen measurable outcomes. Smart Ranking is associated with a 37% improvement in average click position and a 16% lift in click-through rate in a 30-day comparison versus non-Smart Ranked results.
Smart Ranking isn’t “AI that replaces your relevance strategy.” Rather, it’s AI that fine-tunes what’s already there and empowers marketers to craft a higher-value experience that meets visitors where they are.
Practical AI Means Human in the Loop - Especially When Accuracy is the Brand
Our philosophy is simple: AI should empower marketers and digital teams, not replace them.
That’s not a slogan. It’s a response to a real constraint: your brand reputation depends on accuracy. In healthcare and higher ed, a confident-sounding wrong answer can do actual harm. People call those “hallucinations” and the problem isn’t just technical, it’s operational. But at the end of the day, who owns the outcome? It’s the people behind the brand — marketing and digital experience teams.
The practical approach to AI is built around speed to market without sacrificing human expertise and oversight. Two examples that fit this theme:
Smart Match Assist uses AI and natural language processing to learn from user behavior, then helps map “no results” queries to similar successful queries based on click-through events. In plain terms, it helps you eliminate dead ends without requiring your team to chase every edge case manually.
Related Searches allows you to define phrases that should be suggested as related alternatives, shown to users at the bottom of results. This is a simple pattern, but it’s incredibly effective when visitors are in their discovery phase and can gain value from being exposed to additional content. This also helps cut down on dead ends in the discovery journey and helps boost visitor engagement.
Both AI-powered search capabilities fit the overall vision: AI can recommend, accelerate and optimize, while humans maintain control.
Helping Organizations Meet Their Visitors’ Expectations
Here’s the uncomfortable truth a lot of teams are feeling: visitor expectations evolved faster than most onsite search experiences.
Many websites still behave like the user’s job is to translate their need into the site’s taxonomy. But the modern expectation is the opposite; the site should translate the user’s need into the right answer, the right content, the right next step.
The good news is you don’t have to wait for a full website rebuild to catch up. The technology is here and with SearchStax Site Search, you can start modernizing your search experience by making it better equipped to handle natural language searches while keeping control over what’s surfaced and why.
That’s how you stay ahead of the curve, not by chasing every AI trend, but by absorbing the behavioral shift and responding with practical improvements your team can manage.
Looking Ahead: Visitor Behavior Drives Innovation
The biggest AI search moments of 2025 weren’t just product launches across the industry. They were the moments visitors decided, collectively, that search should understand them. That goes for broader search engines, LLMs and onsite search.
Winning organizations won’t be the loudest about AI. They’ll be the ones who adapt fast and deliver experiences people can actually trust.
SearchStax’s approach will remain rooted in practical AI: fast innovation, human oversight, real results. And as visitor expectations keep evolving, we’re committed to staying ahead with AI that empowers your team, not AI that surprises you after it ships.
