Your Site's Search Bar Is Probably Losing You Sales (Here's What to Do About It)

I was on a call last week with a merchant who showed me their site search numbers. Forty-two percent of searches returned zero results. Zero. Not bad results. No results at all.

That’s not a tech problem. That’s a revenue problem you can see from across the room.

Search is now how most people use online shops. Data from Bloomreach’s 2025 report shows site search converts at two to three times the rate of browsing. When someone types in that box, they’re telling you what they want to buy. If you can’t show it to them, they leave.

The old way doesn’t work.

Why keyword matching fails

Traditional site search works like this. A customer types “black running shoes size 10,” and your system looks for products where those exact words show up in the title or text. If your product is listed as “Men’s Performance Runner - Onyx/Black - Size 10,” you might get lucky. If it’s listed as “MR10-BK-P,” you won’t.

This is how you end up with 42% zero-result searches. Your customers don’t speak SKU. They talk like normal people. Your catalog speaks something else.

The gap between how people search and how products are listed has been around for years. What’s new is we we now have tools that close it.

What AI search actually does

AI search works differently. Instead of matching keywords, it tries to understand what the person means. When someone types “shoes for standing all day at work,” an AI system picks up on what they need. Comfort. Durability. Work use. It doesn’t hunt for those exact words in product names.

Algolia, one of the main companies here, reported last year that merchants using their AI search saw sales gains of 24-30% versus old keyword systems. The number that caught my eye: relevance clicks went up by about half. That means someone clicks a result instead of typing a new term.

Elasticsearch put out similar data in their 2025 retail report. Merchants who added semantic search cut zero-result rates by 61% on average. Think about that. More than six out of ten people who would have found nothing now get actual products to look at.

What vendors won’t tell you

Here’s where I push back on the “just add AI search and watch sales grow” story.

AI search is only as good as your merchandising gut. The tech can guess what someone means when they type “something for my mom’s birthday garden.” But it can’t know if you want to show the $40 trowel set or the $200 raised bed kit. You need to tell it your margins, stock levels, and brand stance first.

At Creatuity, we’ve been helping clients add AI search to Magento and Adobe Commerce setups. The ones that work share a pattern. The AI handles the language part. Humans set the business rules. Which brands get pushed when stock is high? Which categories should never show clearance items first? What does “premium” mean for your catalog?

These aren’t tech decisions. They’re merchandising calls that happen to use tech.

Good search helps beyond the search bar

The same methods that fix search also help other parts of the site. Recommendation panels. “Customers also bought” sections. Category page sorting that shifts based on who’s looking.

Coveo put out a case study last year about a seller who swapped static sorting for AI-driven custom results. Their average order value jumped 18% in the first quarter. The products didn’t change. But each visitor saw products sorted by what mattered to them. Not by a default like “newest first.”

The best part? The biggest wins came from returning visitors. First-time shoppers acted about the same. But people who came back got better matches because the system had learned what they liked. That adds up over time.

How to start without betting everything

If you want to upgrade search on your site, here’s what I’d do:

Pull your own search data first. How many queries return zero? What are your top twenty failed searches? That list usually tells you what to fix first.

Check what your platform supports before you add new vendors. Adobe Commerce has good AI search options. Magento Open Source has them through the marketplace. You might not need a separate SaaS contract to get most of the benefit.

Plan for merchandising from day one. Who on your team will tune results? What business rules matter? The best setups treat the AI as a starting point. Not the final answer. Humans check top queries each week and make changes.

Measure the right things. Don’t just track sales rate from search. Track zero-result rate over time. Track time-to-first-click. Track whether people refine their search or leave. Those numbers tell you if it’s getting better.

The bottom line

AI search isn’t magic. It’s not a replacement for knowing your products and your customers. It’s a tool that lets your site understand how people talk about what they want to buy.

The merchants I see winning with this are the ones who pair the tech with strong merchandising gut. The AI does the translation work. The humans handle the strategy.

What’s your zero-result rate right now? And do you know which searches are failing?