Squiz Conversational Search vs commerce-focused search engines: what's the better fit for content-rich websites?

Not all search engines are built for the same purpose. Many of the most well-known platforms are optimized for ecommerce, designed to help users filter and locate products quickly. These commerce-first solutions excel at structured product search, but may not offer the flexibility needed for content-rich environments like higher education, government, or professional services.

That's because these sectors rely on complex, long-form, and often unstructured content, such as academic program pages, legal regulations, grant eligibility guides, or service instructions. They don't fit neatly into product-style databases, and commerce engines aren't designed to interpret nuanced queries or return results that span multiple content formats, departments, or audience types.

In this blog, we explore how Squiz Conversational Search, powered by the Squiz Funnelback engine, compares to the capabilities of commerce-focused search platforms.

The goal? To help you understand which solution is better suited for your organization's needs, and how the right solution delivers value across precision, transparency, and flexibility.

Skip ahead:

• Dissecting commerce search engines
• Dissecting Squiz Conversational Search
• Squiz Conversational Search vs commerce-focused search engines
• Real-world use cases
• Key takeaway and next steps

Commerce-focused search platforms are optimized for ecommerce use cases. They’re fast and efficient at helping users find specific products, filter by attributes, and sort based on structured fields like price, availability, or ratings.

These engines shine when:

• The content is highly structured and lives in product databases
• Results are driven by popularity, sales data, or inventory logic
• The business goal is conversion through rapid product discovery

These engines may be less suited when:

• Instead of looking for products, users are trying to understand processes, seeking step-by-step guidance or find content that spans multiple departments or formats
• The content often spans multiple formats (PDFs, FAQs, forms, long-form articles), with metadata that varies widely
• Relevance depends on intent and semantics, not popularity or keyword hits
• Search needs to be updated frequently by non-technical marketing or content teams, not just developers

Squiz Conversational Search was developed for content-heavy websites that require both search precision and flexible configuration. It’s particularly effective when clarity, precision, and flexibility across varied content formats are essential. It gives digital, content, and IT teams a shared environment to manage, refine, and scale AI-powered search.

Built on the Squiz Funnelback search engine, it combines enterprise-grade retrieval with a conversational interface, offering meaningful results from complex content.

This solution shines when:

• Content is long-form, unstructured, or spread across formats like PDFs, policy docs, or guides
• Relevance depends on user context, intent, and semantic match
• The same content must serve different audiences (e.g. students, staff, citizens)
• Marketers and content teams need to be able to manage and tune search without code
• Governance and transparency are essential, so answers must stay true to the source

This solution may be less suited when:

• The primary goal is real-time product discovery and filtering, such as in ecommerce catalogs
• Search needs to handle inventory changes and merchandising logic at high speed
• The site focuses on utility search with minimal long-form or varied content

How it works

Squiz Conversational Search is built to process unstructured content and return accurate, conversational responses, through:

1. Flexible content ingestion: Squiz can index content from a wide variety of sources, like HTML pages, PDFs, databases, file repositories, and third-party systems, using methods like web crawling, API connectors, or file-based imports.
2. Structured & unstructured content handling: Once ingested, all content is enriched with metadata and processed through Funnelback’s advanced ranking engine, which uses over 75 signals to determine relevance. This includes document structure, semantic similarity, metadata quality, and user intent.
3. Audience scoping: Content collections can be scoped by the audience (e.g. students, staff, citizens), so the AI knows what content to use when different types of users ask similar questions.
4. Natural language interface: When a user asks a question, the AI interprets it in plain language and retrieves the most relevant results from within those scoped, indexed sources. Answers are generated conversationally, but always stay grounded in your approved content.
5. Accuracy by design: A second AI model checks the response for fidelity. Every answer includes links back to the original content for full transparency.

As established, Squiz Conversational Search is built for environments where accuracy, nuance, and content depth matter.

Here are the key differences between this enterprise-grade solution and commerce-focused search engines:

Feature	Commerce-focused engines	Squiz Conversational Search within Squiz Funnelback
Ranking configuration	Basic out-of-the-box ranking, using simple product rules (e.g. popularity, price)	Uses 75+ customizable ranking signals optimized for relevance and content-rich environments
Content support	Optimized for structured data only, like product catalogs or ecommerce-style data	Handles structured and unstructured rich, varied content, like documents, pages, and PDFs
Audience targeting	Limited personalization with a narrow focus that is specific to product catalogues. It also often requires dev work	Built-in content scoping for audience-specific results

Real-world use cases

To understand how commerce-style search engines compare to Squiz in real-world contexts, let’s break down some common scenarios across sectors:

Government use case:

	Commerce-focused engines	Squiz Conversational Search within Squiz Funnelback
When it comes to government websites…	…can help users quickly locate high-demand forms or services with standardized labels. But they may struggle when users search with open-ended questions or need guidance across multiple content types.	…handles diverse content formats like PDFs, FAQs, and service info, and returns AI-generated responses based on context, policy, and structure.
Example: Users searching for “apply for rental assistance”…	… may get a list of related pages, but it comes with little clarity on which is correct.	… get a clear, AI-generated summary of eligibility, steps, and links to the correct form, drawn directly from policy content.

Higher education use case:

	Commerce-focused engines	Squiz Conversational Search within Squiz Funnelback
When it comes to higher education websites…	…may help prospective students quickly find general course or admissions info through product-style listings. But they often return generic results when queries get more specific or audience-based.	…scopes results by audience, returning personalized, intent-aware content for students, staff, or other user groups.
Example: A student searches for “scholarships for postgraduate science”…	…gets a generic list of links, with all scholarship-related content.	…gets a summarized answer based on indexed scholarship pages, scoped to postgraduate content. The response includes a link to the relevant program or eligibility page.

Professional services use case:

	Commerce-focused engines	Squiz Conversational Search within Squiz Funnelback
When it comes to professional services websites…	…can retrieve popular blog content or help clients navigate standard service pages. But they lack the ability to rank by intent or document authority, especially for complex, regulatory questions.	…uses 75+ ranking signals, including content type, structure, and user intent, to prioritize trusted responses.
Example:A client asks, “Do I need to report crypto gains in this year’s tax return?”...	…gets all blog posts with “crypto” in the title.	…gets a policy-based response with clear guidance and a link to the correct regulation, all sourced from the firm’s regulatory content.

Commerce search engines work well for product-driven businesses. But If your organization manages complex content or serves diverse audiences, it may be worth exploring solutions built to support structured and unstructured data, semantic queries, and governance requirements. Squiz Conversational Search, part of the Funnelback engine, supports complex discovery journeys, multi-format content, and user-specific responses, all governed by your own data, not the open web.

This precise, transparent, and user-centric experience helps you simplify operations, serve content more intelligently, and ensure every query leads to real, contextual answers.

Whether you're managing a university site, government portal, or knowledge hub, your content is an asset. Your search engine should help it work harder.

Want advice on how to get started with conversational AI search? Book a 30-minute chat with a Squiz strategy consultant here.