This second article is about a part of the digital experience that is routinely underestimated. Not because people don’t care about it but because they treat it as a feature, not a strategy. I’m talking about search. And if you’re serious about improving customer experience, personalisation, and editorial agility, search needs to be redefined.  

Search Is Not a Feature. It’s an Experience Layer.

Too often, search is plugged in at the end of a project, hooked up, lightly styled, and considered ‘done’. But what we learned is this: in a composable architecture, where content is decoupled and headless, search becomes one of the only truly unifying layers. It’s how your users connect the dots. And if that layer is weak, so is the entire journey. 

We made the decision to treat search not as an afterthought, but as a product in its own right. It had its own backlog, its own metrics, and its technical dependencies. And the results spoke for themselves.

A New Kind of Search Implementation

We used Sitecore Search. But more importantly, we used it the right way. That meant:

• Implementing real-time indexing through Experience Edge webhooks

• Designing multilingual support from day one, including dynamic facets and filter logic in both English and French

•  Integrating analytics to identify not just what was searched, but what failed 

• Enabling business users to tune relevance without needing a release cycle

This wasn’t a bolt-on. It was a fully integrated experience layer. One that respected language, intent, recency, and content structure.

Search That Respects the Author

What made the biggest impact internally wasn’t the UI, it was the real-time feedback loop for authors. Editors could: 

• Publish a piece of content and immediately test how it performed in search 

• Fine-tune metadata and tagging based on real usage 

• Adjust search results without raising a ticket or relying on a dev

It changed the relationship between content and visibility. Search became an extension of publishing, not a mystery box that sat apart from the CMS. 

Composability Requires Findability 

When you go composable, content becomes modular. Pages become assembled. Data becomes decoupled. That’s great for flexibility, but dangerous for discoverability. You can’t expect users to follow navigation the way they once did. You need intelligent search to stitch those journeys together.

That’s why we invested heavily in it. Because it wasn’t just about “can users find things.” It was about whether the architecture itself made sense, whether users could navigate across multiple content types, taxonomies, and formats without friction.

The Strategic Payoff 

Yes, the technical implementation was solid. But the strategic benefit was deeper:

• Marketing owned the experience. They could drive outcomes, not just requests.

• Content authors were empowered, not constrained. 

• Our teams could respond to search data in real time, improving conversion and reducing bounce. 

Final Thought 

Search is no longer a utility. It’s no longer just a box in the header. It’s one of the few remaining places where structure, strategy, and immediacy collide. And in composable digital platforms, it’s the glue.

If you’re still treating search as an accessory, you’re missing the opportunity to create smarter, faster, and more satisfying digital journeys.

In the next article, we’ll shift our focus to the less glamorous, but absolutely essential topic of governance. Because flexibility without control is chaos. And composability doesn’t govern itself.