Why search doesn’t work on intranets
When interviewing employees for an intranet redesign project or a digital workplace project, I often hear “I can’t find anything on the intranet!” and “Search sucks!” Employees can’t find what they need, but those who maintain an intranet don’t know what to do about the complaints. The things they’ve tried in the past haven’t worked out.
I’ve seen a lot of organizations buy a new platform to solve the search problem. Even if you’ve changed intranet platforms in the past, the complaint eventually resurfaces. The problem occurs because of a lack of organization standards, not because of software.
This post explains why things on intranets become unfindable, the costs to your organization, and what an information structure fix looks like.
The complaints and perceptions are true
Employees spend significant time searching for information they need to do their jobs. They search, go to other platforms, look through file shares, then turn to their coworkers when they can’t find information. My own experience researching intranet usage back up studies that find the same result.
A survey in October 2025(1) found that employees spend 4.5 hours per week on average searching and gathering information. It is painful to see knowledge workers pressured to be efficient and effective, but aren’t supported in very basic ways that would improve their efficiency and effectiveness.
Another study found that most employees (72%) rate their intranets as fair to poor(2). I’ve rarely heard employees rave about their intranets and I’ve often heard employees struggle to find information. With the introduction of genAI into the workplace, findability problems are even more frustrating and exacerbating.
I’ve found employees disheartened and disengaged when essential tools aren’t kept up to date. In talking with leaders, I find that they assume the intranet isn’t a big deal. They’ve been with the organization a long time, they know who’s who, and they know where to find information or who to ask.
Employees lower in the hierarchy don’t know these things. On one intranet project, an employee reported to me that the intranet was essential for him to find the person he was looking for. He had been with the organization for less than a year, it was geographically spread out, and he didn’t know who’s who. He started working for the organization during the pandemic and all-remote work, so it was even harder for him to know what he needed to know.
On another intranet project, frontline nurses reported that they had a hard time finding policy and procedure documents. When they searched, they found the same file in multiple places, they were often not up-to-date, and there were multiple versions of the same information. They felt uncared for and unsupported by their managers.
How content on intranets becomes unfindable
When an organization starts a new intranet or digital workplace effort, people are excited and dedicated to keeping things looking good and well organized. As employees add more projects, files, folders, teams, and departments, the intranet becomes a mess. Then we get the inevitable and disruptive REORG! The structure is now out of date.
What’s happening here?
Content is added by whoever needs to add it, in the folder or section seems the most appropriate to that person.
Content is organized around the internal org structures of departments and teams rather than around how users actually think and search. Staff move on, teams reorganize, organizations restructure, and the intranet doesn't change.
Employees don’t know about or use metadata and taxonomy. Content exists but can't be surfaced because it isn't labelled or structured in a way the search engine can use.
Content has no assigned owner. No one is responsible for keeping it current, accurate, or organized. It quietly becomes outdated and misleading. Eventually, no one is responsible or empowered to review and archive or delete the content.
Permissions on files and pages become a nightmare. Some are locked down to just the owner, some to a few people, some to a team, and some are available to everyone. When files are locked down and forgotten, institutional knowledge and value is lost.
I’ve seen all these things happen in just one intranet! A group creates an area on the intranet, locks it down so only a few people can see, creates a deep folder structure or page hierarchy, and creates metadata and taxonomy and then doesn’t use it consistently.
The intranet grows to thousands of pages, content is duplicated, page titles don’t match the content, Content is abandoned, out of date, and contradictory. When employees want to search for information, the intranet search includes multiple versions of the same file.
The cost to your organization
We haven’t figured out how to quantify time spent searching for information, or we figure “that’s just the way things are.” Let’s take an example, using the 4.5 hours mentioned above.
When the worker spends 4.5 hours of their week searching for information, that’s 11% of a 40-hour work week. In 2025, the average American salary was US$62,000. To make it easy, let’s do $62,000 x 11% = $6820 per worker per year. If you have a 200-person organization, that’s about $1.3 million per year a company is spending on people looking for information.
When workers can’t find information, this means they need to spend time recreating it. I’ve also seen companies lose research reports and studies and then pay for this research again.
Cost surfaces with compliance and regulatory risk. Out of date files, policies, procedures, and contradictory information create real risk for organizations, especially in industries like healthcare, government, utilities, universities, and financial services.
Every organization has to carry some risk, but it’s important to look at how much risk tolerance it has vs how much risk it is carrying. If you’re carrying more risk than you can tolerate with intranet content, the issue needs to be addressed.
Now that companies are starting to use genAI on their internal content, the cost continues to increase. I had a client who was using genAI to index and search their body of content, but the content they were using was out of date and contradictory. Now, not only is search not working and employees can’t find content, but also the genAI implementation creates the same problems. (It’s incredibly frustrating to see this kind of project, because it’s a waste of money!)
What good search looks like
To know what to do to fix the problem, we need to know what good search looks like on an intranet. Search keys in on the following things:
Scope: The included directories and files are defined and this is shared with the user.
Pages: Are an appropriate length so they reflect the page title.
Title: Needs to be accurate and descriptive of the content.
Description: needs to describe the content in the file or page, in a few sentences, using good keywords.
Metadata and taxonomy: designed to meet the user needs, reflect the content, and are filled in.
Site structure: the page structure or file structure is built around how users expect to find information
Luckily, the above structural elements also support good browsing and good genAI responses.
How to fix the findability problems
We know what good search looks like, and that supporting good search also supports good browsing and good genAI responses. What does a fix look like?
User research: understand who uses the intranet, what they're looking for, and how they think about information and search
Content audit: analyze what content you have, the scope of the content, where it’s stored, how it’s structured, and how well it’s written.
Stakeholder engagement: interview leadership to know their attitudes toward digital workplace efforts and the intranet’s role in the organization.
Content strategy: outline how content supports the user and organizational goals and identify the specific steps to meet these goals.
Information architecture, metadata, and taxonomy: organize content around user needs, fill in metadata, and use the taxonomy to further support search.
Governance: assign content owners and establish content review processes.
This is ongoing work that requires funding, which might be obvious, but I have encountered organizations who don’t provide long-term funding to the intranet. They provide funding for the initial project and see the intranet effort as one-and-done. When this happens, you’ll encounter the same issues again.
You don’t need to throw out everything to make a start. You can pick off certain aspects of digital workplace issues and intranet issues, and work on improving these areas, then move on to another area.
Organizations often know their intranet isn’t working. Software and new platforms aren’t fixing the problem and employees are frustrated with search that doesn’t work and inability to do their work effectively. If this sounds familiar and you’d like to talk about how I can help, please reach out to me.