Optimizely
Your target persona lands on your Optimizely site and goes straight to the search bar. They rarely come to browse. They arrive with a question, a task or a decision they’re trying to make, and they tell you exactly what they want in their own words.
That moment, the instant someone types a query, is the clearest signal of intent your website ever gets. What happens in the next few seconds determines whether that intent turns into action or a bounce.
The Challenge With Default Search
Optimizely gives your team a solid CMS and smooth authoring experience. But for most organizations, onsite search quietly lags behind the overall digital experience. Search improvements require IT handling. And when search results miss the mark, your hard-earned web visitors leave.
The challenge isn’t unique to Optimizely. We’ve seen outdated search and discovery experiences with almost every CMS. Digital teams publish faster than ever while visitors expect contextual understanding and AI-generated responses, thanks to their daily experiences with Google, ChatGPT and consumer platforms that understand natural language queries.
Introducing the SearchStax Connector for Optimizely
The SearchStax Connector for Optimizely seamlessly integrates Optimizely with SearchStax to deliver AI-powered site search and discovery, so every piece of published content is synchronized and your search index stays current. No manual re-indexing, no lag between when content goes live and when it’s findable.
With SearchStax, you get an AI search and discovery experience that moves at the same speed as your content team.
Search is Just the Starting Point
Smart Answers is the AI layer from SearchStax that recognizes when a question is entered into the search bar and delivers a direct AI generated answer pulled from your published web content. The generative summaries include citations pointing visitors toward the next step, whether that’s a page, a resource or a conversion action. Smart Answers can be configured to maintain governance as well as provide insights back to track behaviors.
With SearchStax and Optimizely, search stops being a dead end or point of friction and starts being the bridge between “I’m looking for something” and “I’m taking action.”
Why Improving Onsite Discovery Matters Now
69% of web visitors go straight to the search bar the moment they land on a site, rather than browsing through navigation and category menus (UX Movement). And 56% of visitors who use onsite search – when the search performs – are more likely to convert (CMSWire, 2026).
At the same time, many organizations are still catching up on the experience and infrastructure sides. Research from CMSWire found that fewer than half of enterprise teams are able to tune their site search in real time, even as expectations for fast, relevant, AI-quality answers keep climbing. Teams running on Optimizely without a purpose-built search layer are, in effect, asking a static index to keep up with a moving target.
The organizations treating search less like a utility bolted onto the CMS, and more like a core part of the digital experience, are the ones best positioned to win engagement and conversion metrics by keeping pace with content, AI and expectations.
Connect live with SearchStax at Opticon
Learn more about the SearchStax Connector for Optimizely at Opticon 2026. If you’re running Optimizely and want to see how to increase engagement and conversion with seamless onsite search and discovery experiences, stop by our booth.
Explore SearchStax
Learn more about SearchStax Site Search and Smart Answers. Contact us today, as we’d love to hear what’s top of mind for you and your website.
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Product marketing director driving product awareness through great experiences, messaging clarity and solid positioning.
