Our search queries are longer than our help articles.

We analyzed 840,000 in-product search queries and compared them to our documentation titles.

Median search query: 7 words
Median help article title: 4 words
Top search query: "how do I share a folder with someone outside my company"

Our help article for that was titled "Sharing." Users were typing full sentences. We had written nouns.

When we rewrote the top 50 article titles to match the actual query phrasing, search-to-article click rate rose from 19% to 44%, and "search abandoned" sessions dropped 31%. We had been optimizing for how we organize knowledge, not for how people ask for it.

The deeper finding: the top 20 queries were all "how do I" questions. Our docs were structured as feature references.

We were answering a question nobody was asking in the way they were asking it.

What are your users actually typing, and does it match what you have written?