The cost of a broken search

There is a drink I love. An M&S apple and elderflower sparkling water that, for reasons I cannot fully explain, tastes faintly of rose water. When I discovered it in store, I immediately thought: brilliant, I get my M&S shopping through Ocado. I'll order it every fortnight.

Next shop, I searched for it. Nothing. I assumed it wasn't listed yet. Maybe too new.

This went on for two months. I'd given up. Then I found it completely by accident while looking for something else entirely.

The problem? The word I'd searched was "Juicy", the big bold label printed across the front of the can. I'd assumed it was a sub-brand name. It wasn't. And Ocado's search had no idea what I meant.

That's a synonym failure. And it was quietly costing them.

A synonym, in the context of site search, is an alternative word or phrase that maps to a product, category, or piece of content your customer is actually looking for.

Your customer searches "Juicy." Your product is filed under "sparkling spring water." Without a synonym connecting those two things, the search returns nothing. The customer assumes you don't stock it. They move on.

Synonyms are one of the most powerful and most neglected tools in onsite search. They let search behave as if it understands the customer's intent, not just their exact words. They compensate for gaps in metadata. They bridge the distance between how your team describes a product and how a customer thinks about it.

A good synonym strategy doesn't stop at the obvious. You map the label on the tin. You map the seasonal search term, "Stoptober" from mid-September for alcohol-free drinks, for instance. You map the lifestyle phrase "sober curious," "low and no," "AF." You think about the customer standing in front of their phone at 9pm, tired, trying to remember what that thing was called.

Let's do the maths.

Ocado has roughly 980,000 active customers placing regular grocery orders. I'm one of them. For two months, I didn't add that drink to my basket. A pack costs £4, and I'd have bought it fortnightly. That's £8 of missed spend from me alone.

Now scale that up. Imagine 80% of Ocado's customers - around 752,000 people, failing to find at least one item they're looking for each week. Some items are higher value, some lower. Average it out at £3 per customer.

That's £2.25 million per week in basket spend that never happens. Not because the product doesn't exist. Not because the customer doesn't want it. Because the search didn't connect the two.

That figure is illustrative, not audited. But the principle holds at any scale. If your customers can't find what they came for, they don't buy it. They may not come back.

The good news is that synonym gaps are diagnosable and fixable. They're not glamorous work, but they are high-impact. A proper synonym strategy, built on real search data and an understanding of how your customers actually think, can recover significant lost revenue - often without touching your product catalogue, your platform, or your content.

The harder part is knowing what you don't know. Most businesses don't properly interrogate the searches that return nothing. The zero-results report shows what visitors are typing, but it sits untouched, or isn't configured at all. Worse still, the dots aren't being connected between that report and your keywords and synonyms. Customers fail silently. You assume the product isn't selling. The lost revenue never shows up anywhere it would prompt you to act.

That's where a diagnostic comes in. Not a lengthy consultancy engagement, a focused, structured look at what your search is actually doing, what it's missing, and what to fix first.

If you've read this and felt a flicker of recognition, it's worth finding out what your search is quietly costing you.

Murmuration helps retailers and digital teams understand and fix onsite search. Get in touch if you'd like to talk through what a diagnostic might look like for your site.