SearchStax CEO Sameer Maggon on the evolution of on-site search

Speaker A: Hi, I'm Greg Hillstrom and here's a question for you. What if the most important part of your website navigation is the one most brands treat as an afterthought? Agility requires not only adapting your marketing messages, but also re evaluating the fundamental ways that customers interact with your digital properties. It means recognizing that established tools like site navigation may no longer meet the expectations of a new generation of users.

Speaker B: The Agile Brand

Speaker C: Foreign

Speaker D: welcome to the B2B Agility Podcast where we look at the factors that drive success in B2B marketing with a focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make B2B brands stand out and thrive in a competitive marketplace. I'm your host, Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech marketing operations and CX, best selling author and speaker. Now let's get on to the show.

Speaker A: Today we're going to talk about the evolution of on site search from a simple utility to a strategic AI powered content discovery engine. We're going to explore how changing consumer expectations, particularly from younger demographics, are forcing brands to rethink digital experiences. And why the humble search bar may be the key to unlocking deeper engagement and building trust. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Samir Magan, founder and CEO at SearchStacks. Sameer, welcome to the show. What if the most important part of your website navigation is the one most brands treat as an afterthought? Today we're going to talk about the evolution of on site search from a simple utility to a strategic AI powered content discovery engine. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Samir Magin, founder and CEO at SearchStacks. Sameer, welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Thank you, Greg.

Speaker E: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Definitely. Ah, a lot to talk about here. Before we dive in though, why don't

Speaker A: you give a little background on yourself and your role at Searchstacks.

Speaker B: Sure. I'm um, the founder and CEO of SearchStacks. My entire career really revolving around helping enterprises deliver better business outcomes at the intersection of search data and digital experiences. At ah, Searchstacks, we help organizations transform search from a basic website feature into an intelligent discovery experience. So really started the company last, you know, 10 years back. Simple observation. Enterprises spend millions and millions of dollars, you know, websites, content, digital experiences often under invest in at the moment when the, you know, customers come to their website and start typing into the search box and looking for something.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Uh, people express intent when they get the experience right. The better experience and the better outcomes are Delivered. So my role, CEO, mix of company vision, building and empowering a great team. I work very closely with our key customers and partners and making sure we're building products that solve real world problems. And more recently, as you're aware, with all the focus and shift towards AI. AI, my role is also trying to make sure I'm helping partners and customers navigate. Right. How to best utilize AI and how to make sense of it.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, love it.

Speaker E: Well, yeah, let's dive in then. And I think that's a great segue to the topics that we're going to talk about. And I want to start with something that I teed up in the intro. And it's really just this strategic shift of how on site search has potential potentially been viewed in the past as a utility to a much more strategic discovery engine. And how do you frame this conversation to, you know, certainly searchstacks? Uh, this is what, this is what you do. Right. So how do you position this and really elevate it to the level that I think it needs to be elevated to as a strategic driver of that digital experience and customer engagement rather than just, you know, something that you kind of have to have on your site? Almost an afterthought.

Speaker B: Yeah, I would echo. It definitely is an aftershow for a lot of people, especially on the website side of things. Um, historically. Right. What organizations have done is like you mentioned, it's treated search as a feature.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: It's just a small box there. It's in the corner and helps people find things. But I don't think that's the right way to think about it moving forward.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Search is one of the highest leverage moments in the entire digital experience. I think that's the only place where, think about it, your users, your customers coming in and actually telling you what they're trying to accomplish in their own words.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Uh, they've moved beyond browsing. They of course came to your website. They have an intent and they're looking for a product, they're looking for an answer, they're looking for documentation, they're looking for support. And in the commerce cases, they're looking to transact.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: So, and that's, you know, the next step in the journey. And, and I'm sure you and I have both experienced.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: If that doesn't work on a company's website, that's frustrating.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: And the rest of the digital investment doesn't matter. Um, and you know, you may have a beautifully designed website, great content, but as soon as users trying to find something, they're going to be abandoning your website and then going back to Google. So you really lost the user at that point. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Speaker C: No, please, please.

Speaker B: AI has raised these stakes further, right? I mean, your and my behavior, the customer behavior is no longer, uh, just asking a couple of keywords in the box, right? You're now being compared against ChatGPT perplexity, AI agents, the expectations are fundamentally changing. So that's, I think that's the fundamental reason I believe cert's evolving from being a utility into a strategic capability. And that's how people should think about it now.

Speaker E: Well, and that, that leads to really just the behavior of how people are navigating the web. I mean, you know, you touched on it already with, you know, how many of us, myself included, are using some of those tools that you mentioned to navigate the web. When someone lands on a website, they don't all of a sudden their expectations or, uh, how they would like to navigate doesn't automatically change. If an option isn't there, then they're going to try to use what's there. But, uh, your company's talked about the

Speaker A: death of the website menu.

Speaker E: Just kind of driven by this expectation of, okay, when I land on a site, I was on ChatGPT or perplexity or what to get to this site when I land on that site, why should my experience be different?

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker E: So, you know, for, for a large enterprise with a complex website, you know, what's the most compelling reason that they should treat this shift not just as a passing fad or trend, but as something that's.

Speaker A: That's pretty urgent?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think we're traditionally, yeah, we, we definitely talk a lot about, you know, death of the menu. Right. But there's another way to think about it, right? One way to think about it is death of the menu. I think fundamentally there is an evolution happening on how people discover information.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: For years, you know, websites been built around navigation menus because that's the best way to organize information. That's how we know how to organize information. Um, if you take a step back, right? Where really m menus and navigation came from was catalogs.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: If you think about yellow pages, if you think about white pages, that's, you know, indexes and catalogs was the only way to traverse and go into the detail of a particular content, uh, content source and, and, and people replicated that on the websites. I think with the technology where, where it's going now your website has hundreds and hundreds of pages. Sometimes we see millions of pages and content pieces spread across multiple domains and websites. CMS platforms, dxp platforms, knowled PDFs, videos, podcasts. You just simply can't organize that information into navigation menu that is very, very intuitive for the visitor. Um, in the old days, Yahoo used to provide a bunch of links when you go to Yahoo. Google completely changed that.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Same, uh, with Yellow Pages. It used to be a book, then it became white pages or yellow Pages, and then now you just go to Google Maps, right? And then that's it. You just type in what you're looking for and it comes back with exactly what the answer is. So fundamentally, I believe the user expectations are changing and the challenge is no longer creating content. And especially with the tools and LLMs, now people are creating content at uh, a very, very, uh, dramatic kind of pace. So what becomes super important is how do you help your users discover that information or the right information at the right time, right when they're looking for. And that's, I think it's important from a, uh, strategic perspective. It's how do you build trust, how do you build better experience, how do you outperform. Right. Kind of those expectations from a user perspective.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, well.

Speaker E: And you know, certainly there's a lot of, we talk about AI on uh, every episode of the show and some are solely about that general topic, but it's hard to escape it at this point. But what I see a lot and what I've written about, what I talk about other leaders with is just beyond the hype and beyond just. I think there's two things. There's hype and then there's also just. It's also a baseline expectation that you

Speaker A: adopt certain things, but somewhere in between

Speaker E: there's the value discussion of, you know, are we just adopting these things because the other, you know, the other our competitor is doing it or we read about this thing and, or our teams are using it anyway, um, that's a whole other topic. But, um, so, you know, how should organizations be thinking about getting real value from using AI in their, in their discovery experience?

Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot of noise right around AI right now. Like as you mentioned, easy to get caught up. Uh, I've had numerous conversations right, about latest models, all the features. I mean you're seeing tremendous, probably unprecedented pace of capabilities being released right, by OpenAI and all the LLM kind of based technologies and new models keep coming on my thoughts and all that kind of stuff. I would encourage organizations to kind of take a step back and look at what has fundamentally changed what has actually changed, I think the shift is definitely there's fundamental changes around technology. Computers are great, um, at identifying it used to be really good at math, right now they're starting to be good at understanding words and natural language. So that's a fundamental change on the technology side, I believe over the last decade. We've always aspired around natural language. How can we bring natural language experiences to the users? Fundamentally technology was not there. Now the technology is getting to that point where assuming hallucinations and all those things will be solved. Fundamentally technology is there that machines can actually understand language. And with that, I think the biggest shift we are seeing is, you know, we guys are finally, you know, finally able to interact with machines and websites the way naturally we do, as opposed to us trying to adapt to how computers work. I think computers are adapting to how humans work. So the user expectations are changing in my mind. Right. And that's becoming the new baseline. So AI is a powerful enabler but at the end of the day it's also as good as content. Your content, your data, your business context. Um, AI won't fix those problems. Right. And in some cases now based on the technology, it will expose it very, very quickly. So I think it's less about thinking about what's my AI, ah, strategy as it relates to digital experience. I think it's more about how do I think about the customer experience, how do I think about discovery strategy and then how can I utilize the advancements in technology in order to improve that experience and how do I bring that experience to the market?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker E: Because I mean, I think to your point, I mean, you know, to take it back to earlier in the conversation, for better or worse, I remember those days of the Yahoo directories and I'll be honest, there were times where the directory based navigation was better than the search alternative. This was in the, you know, this was early days search obviously massively improved. You know, Google, you know, did, did very, very well to improve upon that. But again that was a technology shift that understood customers kind of to what you're saying here. It shifted more towards understanding how humans wanted to behave, but still limited to that interface. Now we're moving to this more natural conversational interface. And I think we're, again to your point, we're evolving and technology is evolving closer to a, uh, natural communication. But I think a lot of orgs are still uh, basing their content decisions or even their experience decision based on what, what a, even a directory. But you know, even what the old school, uh, search Maybe was, was asking for what, what are the new kind of, you know, what are the first party signals or other types of information that are, are beneficial and really help feed this AI powered search to uh, to really be most beneficial to the customer?

Speaker B: Yeah. You know what's surprising is um, there's a lot of conversation about first party data, third party data. Right. Um, if you think about one of the richest sources of customer insight is actually there on your website. It's your own search bar and search data. And it's surprising I would say when I go and have a conversation with a lot of the digital teams out there, you know, don't quote me on this number, but generally my 70 to 80% of the conversations I ask a simple question, um, do you know what are your top no result searches and what are your top searches that people are coming to your website to search for? And you'll be surprised. So many times people are like we don't know. So you know they have that data. Right. The people are coming to their website. Imagine a healthcare system, million monthly visitors today, I think the statistics say 43% head straight to search. So these are hundreds and thousands of people telling you exactly what they're trying to accomplish and we're failing short. And that's first party data signal that you already have. You don't need to go outside to get that. And these are customers who've come or landed to your website. They've shown the intent that they have something to do with your brand.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: So that data is already there. I think it's a continuous research mechanism and if you're using it well it can be used to shape content strategy, digital experience, business priorities.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Uh, where should I invest my time? Because I know how that is prioritized based on what my users are looking for.

Speaker E: Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, I mean I think that's such a good point of. I think there's a lot of time spent on how does you know what Google searches are driving people here. But to your point, the information that is theirs, the organizations and that they should have ideally uh, direct access to, they're not really querying that. So yeah, it's kind of a potential gold mine there of information and also I would imagine for a complex organization, for any organization. But think about a healthcare system or university or something like that, the cost of a user not finding what they need is pretty high to both parties really.

Speaker A: Can you maybe share an example of

Speaker E: how improving search directly translated to a business outcome there?

Speaker C: Sure.

Speaker B: Let's talk about while we are on healthcare systems. Let's talk about. I won't name names, but one of the health systems in western United States receiving roughly about 90,000 annual, uh, sorry, 900,000 annual phone calls related to portal password resets. Something as simple as portal password resets.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: The interesting part right. Wasn't the call volume, it was what search revealed.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: When you look at the search analytics data, portal login was one of the most searched term on the website.

Speaker C: Wow. Yeah.

Speaker B: Once that became visible, the solution was fairly simple.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: The content team created a self service guidance. How can we improve the discovery experience around it? And at the end once they did that, they accomplished 10% reduction in the portal related car volume. So if you do the math, I think it costs roughly around $150,000 in annual savings for that organization by gleaning on just one insight of the data that you already have. So we see that pattern repeatedly.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Uh, whether it's a healthcare system, whether it's a higher education system, uh, looking for funding or anything like that. Those patterns are so much out there. And E commerce companies have learned that.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: They've really perfected that art. Um, but I don't think a lot of brands and content websites pay that much attention to what they already have and it exposes friction that a company already has that they don't realize existed.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker E: I mean it's either an opportunity or it's a relatively easy fix to a challenge like the call volume. I mean that's a huge, that's a huge cost savings and customer or you know, patient frustration that could be solved with, you know, nothing, nothing's easy. But a simple fix, um, is, uh, yeah, could, could definitely do that.

Speaker B: Yeah. And you know, think about it.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: We all kind of are aware.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Once you identify a problem. Right. I didn't. Problem identified is half solved.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And, and that you could be solving 50 different problems. But what search analytics or search insights give you on your website, it gives you a prioritization mechanism as well.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: What's most important as opposed to solving for each and every part, what's the biggest bang for the buck that I'm going to pay attention to and then go solve for it.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: So I want to get back a

Speaker E: little bit to the trends here and talk a little bit about where you see things going here. Certainly we've talked about the evolution of search and search behaviors. Uh, are we moving towards a world where the concept of search is, I don't want to say fundamentally different, but is Our definition of search evolving and is it more about the conversational and the answers than it is going to be about a page of links or is there going to be room for both? Where do you see all this going?

Speaker B: I think from a vision perspective, I am super excited. We are already doing a lot of things around answers, so there's a lot of opportunities. We're already seeing that in the consumer search side of things. Enterprises typically follow consumer search behavior when it comes to search side of things. I believe we're all using Gemini now and looking at the Google Air overviews and answers. I think that to me is not even two or three years. The technology is there, solutions are there. I think where I am seeing a lot of organizations, especially enterprises, is they're still in that journey of hesitation, of adoption and rightfully so.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker B: Where you know, a healthcare system cannot, you know, cannot just have a incorrect answer right given to give it to a system. So if you think two to three years from now, uh, let's uh, assume hallucination, um, trust problem is solved, right, by technology, tooling, governance, whatever you, you know, however, whatever solutions we put in place, if that's the case, I think asking a question and getting an answer is going to become a default norm and then utilizing that and bringing context into the equation and having a conversation, um, is going to be a natural extension. Now I think to answer your question, is conversation going to take over regular search? I don't think so. I think there is room for both to exist. I think really depends upon what the user is trying to do. It's kind of jobs to be done. What's the job that the user is trying to do. If they're into a mode where they want to have a deeper, uh, conversation, I think conversational search will be great for that. If they're more informational seeking discovery, that may or may not kind of work, right. They may want to still go with 10 links and then for tasks it might just be, I'm coming here, I'm looking for your support policy. I got your support policy, I'm satisfied and I'm out. So I believe all three modes will exist. I think the experience and the interfaces are going to become smarter to understand what are you trying to achieve. And the user won't have to be going through the painful process of telling the system what I'm trying to, you know, what I'm trying to achieve. So I think that's where the interfaces are going to become very dynamic on uh, the websites. And I think it's A good thing from a user perspective. They're going to get more natural experience that they're used to.

Speaker E: Yeah, yeah, agreed. Uh, I always say they don't take things away, they just keep adding more.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker E: So it's, but it's good, you know, do for a short task. It's great to be able to just get a quick result versus a uh, complex answer and things. What would your advice be to. Because again there's only going to be more, not fewer possibilities. What should an enterprise do to prepare for all of the three different modes that you kind of mentioned? Is there something about their content strategy or something that they should be thinking about to be able to adapt and have something that can really uh, apply to all of those?

Speaker B: Uh, I think two things organizations will have to become better at. I think investments are already there but they need to increase the investments is content authority and content quality. Uh, content quality is super important. I can have a best answer experience but if my website's giving me a, you know, wrong pieces of content to look at, I mean search is as good as your content. So if you're going to give it a bad content, you're going to get a bad answer.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: And that may actually expose the problem much bigger and then you know, it becomes a much bigger problem. Because right now what people do is if there's so much content they expect the search relevance can hide all the outdated contents kind of, you know, behind the scene. I think with answers and all that kind of stuff, the technology that might, you know, kind of expose all those things up on top. So having strong, you know, quality content governance is super important. Uh B, I think you need to have a more deeper analytics around how people are interacting with your website. Most of the marketing teams or digital experience team today track clicks, right? Clicks. You know, how is my customer journey happening from a click through perspective? If people can interact with machines in a natural language manner, they need to up level their analytics to understand how conversations are happening. You know, what's happening in that interaction is gonna be super important. And that's an area of investment that's you know, not a lot of organizations have that technology today. And then last but not the least, the user experience side of things need to be evolved. Um, you know, the user experience needs to be much, much more interactive as opposed to driven by. I just went to Google search for something and I just need to have a link form and then that link form will make sure that users coming to the right, you know, page and then, and read that page and go away. So those are the three things I would say is analytics, understanding search and conversational analytics. How do you make sure the content governance pieces are there? And last but not the least, how are you making sure the user experience is evolving from just pure links to a search, more deeper search based experience?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Love it.

Speaker E: Well, Sameer, thanks so much for joining today. I, uh, got one last question for you before we wrap up here. What do you do to stay out in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?

Speaker B: Um, I talk to a lot of customers. A lot of partners listen to podcasting. Uh, including yours, I think you have two of those. Uh, and I like to read a book once a month. And personally, I'm a lifelong learner. I try to pick up a new skill every year. Um, this year on the personal side, I've picked up sailing. So that kind of keeps my brain fresh. Um, but then at the end of the day, um, I think technology keeps evolving. Methods will evolve. I typically like and challenge the team to say, what's our long term vision? Let's start with the customer, let's start with the experience and then work backwards from there. Right. I think that helps organization deliver better experiences and better outcomes and use the technology and make sure that we don't get stuck in the old methods.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Love it.

Speaker E: Well, again, I'd like to thank Samir

Speaker A: magan, founder and CEO at SearchStax, for joining the show. You can learn more about Samir and Searchstax by following the links in the show notes.

Speaker D: Thanks again for listening to the B2B Agility podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes and the show at www.b2b agility.com. that's b2b agility.com while you're there, check out my series of best selling agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. Until next time, stay focused and stay agile.

Speaker B: The agile brand.