Is content still king?
With estimates of organizations spending around $40,000 to $60,000 per month on content marketing, the answer might be yes. Yet, that digital content — and the effort that goes into creating it — is wasted when no thought is put into the content discovery process.
Coveo’s recent Customer Experience (CX) Relevance Report found that 84% of 4,000 consumer respondents felt they had to put in high amounts of effort to find information online. And 53% said the biggest contributor to a negative digital experience was the inability to find information on their own.
“It doesn’t matter how good your content is if your customers and users can’t find it,” said Patricia Petit-Liang, Platform Product Marketing Manager at Coveo, during a recent discussion about content discovery methods with Rob Strube, Associate Director of Engineering at Whereoware with 20 years of software development experience.
Together, the two revealed how modern search technologies like the Coveo AI-Relevance™ Platform can help surface great content when and where it’s needed, to the people who need it most.
Content Discovery Challenges
According to research conducted by Acrolinx, the average Fortune 2000 business creates 400 web pages a month. Prospective customers, according to the same source, spend around 23 minutes per visit — meaning enterprises need to get the right information in front of those visitors quickly if they want to engage or even convert them.
But there are several obstacles standing in the way of effective content discovery:
Scattered Content
Content creation is a task shared across an organization. Different teams create documents for different needs, storing it in everything from content management systems and knowledge bases to digital asset management platforms and customer relationship systems. In 2023, AIIM noted a considerable increase in companies managing 7-10 systems. And while each tool serves its purpose, they also contribute to a problem: content fragmentation.
While it can be difficult for an employee who knows their company and its products to find what they need, imagine this from the customer’s perspective. They’ll have their own way of describing their questions or problems, and they’ll have zero idea as to how an enterprise organizes their information.
And this is a problem that doesn’t seem to have an easy fix — during the discussion, Strube noted that enterprises are often held back because of legacy systems or homegrown solutions.
“They’ve been there for years, and it will be extremely painful to move that content or data and unify it into a single platform,” he said. “Not that that’s not an admirable goal, right? But there are reasons for not being able to move that information.”
Basic Search
Information retrieval on the wider web has made it easier than ever to dive deep into topics. Enterprise site search capabilities are another story. During the webinar Strube described a search scenario he experienced recently, where he was purchasing auto parts for his camper van.
“All of the auto store websites I was searching on, their search was pretty painful to work with,” he said. “I had to game the system by changing my query terms over and over again. These companies could ease that friction for customers who are just trying to give them money.”
In the CX Relevance Report, we found that 43% go straight to the search bar when they land on a website with a specific intent in mind. This shows that site visitors expect search to help them quickly and easily find exactly what they’re looking for. When this doesn’t happen, 72% will abandon the website, going to Google or a competitor instead.
But when search is limited to traditional functionality like keyword matching — especially on information-heavy sites burdened with tons of unstructured content — they either come up empty with zero results or they can be overwhelmed with irrelevant information.
Relevant reading: In A Zero Click Search World, Site Search Is Essential for SEO and SEM
No Visibility into Customer Expectations
One area that often stumps enterprises when designing a digital experience is recognizing what their target customer wants, rather than what the enterprise thinks they want.
“Customers are so often focused on building that they don’t stop to ask, ‘is what we’re building actually effective and solve problems?’” said Strube. Research emphasizes this. A 2023 study of 500 C-suite executives and 6,000 consumers revealed that 76% of executives believed their company had a comprehensive 360-degree view of the customer and delivered personalized experiences. Only 25% of consumers agreed.
Further, 88% of consumers said that less than half of the content they receive from brands is relevant to them.
“Rather than building something based on a hunch or intuition, collecting data on how your customers are interacting with your site is the gold standard for a successful implementation,” said Strube.
Key Features in a Modern Content Discovery Platform
So how can today’s enterprises overcome these challenges, and deliver a content discovery journey that answers questions and compels site visitors to convert?
Modern AI search is one answer. With a content discovery platform like Coveo, enterprises can overcome fragmented content without re-platforming or data relocation. Let’s review some of the key features in the AI-relevance platform.
Unified Index
The backbone of any effective discovery strategy is centralization — but not through brute-force migration. What makes a unified index truly powerful is its ability to virtualize unification: to aggregate and normalize content across disparate platforms without physically consolidating it.
This approach is particularly critical for enterprises operating on layered tech stacks, often across business units. During the webinar, it was clear that modern organizations simply cannot afford to “rip and replace” long-entrenched systems. Instead, they need a way to make fragmented data accessible and searchable from a single source of truth.
Coveo can solve for this. Its unified index is a proprietary search engine built over the last 20 years. It’s the foundation for a strong retrieval system that supports a relevant, secure content discovery strategy. The Coveo index not only stores and normalizes information from various external systems but also indexes existing permissions at the document level — meaning only those who have access to view a document even see that document in their search results.
Out-of-the-Box Connectors
What enables this unified index in practice are enterprise search connectors — specifically, low-code and pro-code options that support the needs of both business and technical users. Universal connectors that speak REST, GraphQL, and SQL allow enterprises to bypass expensive, custom integrations that often bottleneck digital transformation projects.
During the conversation, Strube highlighted how teams were able to use different connector types for different source systems — assigning ownership to whoever best understood the data. That modularity let them move faster while still maintaining control and clarity.
This decentralized-but-connected model becomes essential as enterprises scale and evolve. It allows internal teams — even non-technical ones — to onboard new sources without triggering large-scale reimplementation.
Relevant reading: Limitless Connectivity? Why Quality Matters Over Quantity in Enterprise Search Connectors
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Relevance isn’t static; it’s behavioral. Once content is centralized and accessible, the next challenge is surfacing the right content to the right person at the right time — and that’s where artificial intelligence and machine learning take the wheel. Coveo’s suite of pre-built models bridge a comprehension gap between how humans talk and what computers can understand.
“Search has really changed, especially now with AI,” said Strube. “Before, I wouldn’t talk to Google with natural language. I would search with keywords, with pluses and minuses.
“I think people call it Google Foo, where you ask your question in a way that the computer would understand. Coveo’s support for natural language questions is really important, because people are used to asking ChatGPT a question the same way you’d talk to a person.”
Innovations like generative answering are shifting search expectations, especially among younger demographics — which only underscores the need to deliver natural language, conversational experiences.
Relevant reading: Free Ebook | Generative AI and Top AI Models for CX
Robust Search Analytics
Understanding what’s working — and what’s not — is no longer optional. It’s essential to iterating on content, search design, and discovery architecture. Coveo offers search analytics reporting built right into the platform, and supplies both template reporting dashboards and the ability to design custom ones.
“And you’d be surprised, like some of the things you discover, you might think users are searching on particular terms or keywords or like specific particular questions,” said Strube. “And then when you actually look at the data, it’s different than you expected.”
Search analytics are a direct window into how customers think about your products and services. This gives you unique insight into what content is most useful, questions you may not have thought of, and reveal content gaps you can fill to expand your digital experience.
In addition to using analytics to sculpt the experience, they’re also deeply useful for evaluating the overall impact of your search implementation.
“You need analytics to show the ROI of your different search initiatives,” said Petit-Liang. “It’s not just about improving the user experience. It’s about proving that the technology you’ve invested in is driving results.”
Best Practices for Enhanced Content Discovery
Clean content
Search is only as good as the content it retrieves. If that content is riddled with inconsistencies or suffers from poor tagging, even the most advanced AI can only do so much.
Strube explained the importance of structuring content early in the ingestion process. “We visualized the data as it came in. Sometimes we’d clean it at the source, sometimes within the platform. But we were always refining it before putting it in front of users.”
To avoid boiling the ocean, Coveo can assist with data cleaning and normalization via its index. With indexing pipeline extensions and other features, you can transform, clean and standardize data.
Relevant reading: 6 Data Cleaning Challenges Blocking AI Success (& How Coveo Solves Them)
User research
Before you configure a single connector or design your search UI, you need to deeply understand the people you’re designing it for. That starts not just with data, but with direct insight into user behavior, motivation, and intent.
User research is the safeguard against assumptions. It shifts the focus from “what do we want to publish?” to “what do our users need to solve their problem right now?”
By identifying these needs early, organizations can design discovery flows that resonate with real-world behaviors, not internal priorities. This approach doesn’t just improve usability. It builds trust, reduces friction, and turns your content into a strategic asset instead of a digital landfill.
Intentional design
Intentional design is about architecting a discovery experience that reflects how users actually seek information — and ensuring that experience evolves as their needs do.
The process starts with evaluating which content types and source systems actually contribute value to these journeys. Identifying these lets you prioritize high-impact content sources and reduce noise.
From there, identify where users most often initiate their content journeys. These are your search hubs — the primary digital touchpoints like support centers, product pages, community forums, intranet portals, or knowledge bases. Prioritizing these environments ensures your most critical user interactions are the most intuitive and effective.
Equally important is iteration. Design doesn’t stop at deployment. As user behavior shifts — due to new products, seasonal changes, or shifting support trends — the search experience must shift too. This is where AI can really shine; by boosting resources relevant to a specific audience or interest and burying irrelevant content that would only clutter search results. It can also tweak search facets, offer query suggestions, and highlight recommended next steps that keep site visitors moving along their journey.
Ready to Rethink Your Content Discovery Methods?
It’s no longer enough to create content. You must create connection. That means reimagining how your audiences find, engage with, and act on your content.
Modern discovery isn’t about links. It’s about outcomes.
And if your platform, processes, or strategy aren’t getting you there, maybe it’s time to ask the only question that matters:
Can your content be found — by the right person, at the right time, in the right way?
If not, it’s time to change your methods.
Listen to the full discussion to get all the insights.
Dig Deeper
Customers demand more value and relevance from every interaction while abiding zero friction. In the Visibility Blueprint — coauthored by Coveo and Whereoware — we explore trends like the transformative power of generative AI and its impact on the digital journey.
Based on real-world experience and industry research, this playbook offers clear, actionable strategies to close the gap between content and outcomes. It details how to connect fragmented systems, remove friction, and turn discoverability into a measurable driver of revenue and customer loyalty.