Optimizing for searchability and retrieval (for standard and AI search) – Best Practices
Increase the effectiveness of your site’s search and make sure that relevant information is retrieved and surfaced for your users.
On How Does Search on Viewport Sites Work? we have explained the inner workings of the search functionality in Viewport sites.
In this best practice article you will learn how you can adjust your content to make the search in your site (both standard and AI search) more effective in retrieving and surfacing relevant information to your users and giving them the best search results possible.
Create Concept Pages and Add Definitions
Make sure to create concept pages for the concepts you introduce in your documentation or at least make sure that all concepts are defined somewhere in your content. This is especially relevant for those concepts that are unique to your offering.
Creating definitions is important in order to increase the quality and accuracy of AI search responses.
Use Terminology Consistently
Use terminology, especially keywords of your documentation, consistently across your articles. Additionally, sprinkle in synonyms and related terms next to your terminology.
Using synonyms will make your search more flexible as it allows for cases where users use terms that deviate from those you use in the documentation.
Make Knowledge Explicit
Users will often search for information that you might consider to be generally known or obvious.
As experts of the matter at hand, don't assume too much knowledge from your users when writing your articles. This means you should almost always assume that users don’t have implicit knowledge of or experience with a concept or process and explicitly define and explain these in your documentation.
To avoid cluttering your documentation, it’s a good idea to keep this ‘basic’ or ‘introductory’ information separate from what you define to be the core content of your documentation. You can separate this information out into its own articles or even its own page trees.
Being able to access foundational knowledge or knowledge that underlies your core documentation will help the AI search return accurate answers and allow your users to apply the knowledge.
Include Key Information in Article Title and Body
Make sure that relevant information isn’t just included in the title but also in the body of the article, and vice versa. It’s always a good idea to start an article with an introductory text that summarizes the purpose of the article and the contents that follow.
For standard search, keyword hits in the title are weighted higher than in the body of the article. However, including the same information in the body increases the quality of AI search responses and makes the article easier to understand for users.