Your customers use different words than your product pages
The most useful report in Magento is free, already installed, and almost never opened
TL;DR
Somebody searched your store for waterproof jacket and got nothing. You stock it. It is called the Aquashield Parka AS-200. Nobody on earth searches for that. Magento has recorded this for you, free, since Magento 1, and most merchants have never opened the report.
This is part of the Magento Black Friday readiness checklist. Black Friday 2026 is 27 November. If you want to change anything structural, the deadline that binds is 2 October.
Where to find it
In your Magento admin: Reports, then Marketing, then Search Terms. It lists every phrase customers typed into your search box, how many times, and how many results came back.
It has been there since Magento 1. It costs nothing, needs no extension, and it is first-party data about buying intent from people already on your site.
The column that matters is Results. A search with a high count and zero results is a customer who wanted to give you money and could not find the thing.
Two very different problems that look identical
Every zero-result search falls into one of two categories, and almost every tool lumps them together and leaves you to work out which.
A content gap: they searched for something you do stock, using words that appear nowhere in your product copy. That is a copywriting job and it is often twenty minutes of work for a product you already have in the warehouse.
A catalogue gap: they searched for something you genuinely do not sell. That is a buying decision, not a copywriting one. Separating the two is where the value is.
Why this matters more before peak
Peak traffic is more expensive traffic. Whether you are paying for it or earning it, more people arrive in November than in June, so every percentage point of search failure costs more than it does the rest of the year.
The words shoppers type into your site search are also the words they type into Google. Fixing the copy improves on-site conversion and organic visibility at the same time, from the same list.
It is one of very few peak jobs that is pure upside, needs no deploy, and can be done after your code freeze because it is content rather than code.
The rest of the demand picture
Check your delivery cut-off dates are correct, published, and visible before checkout rather than after it. Late-November abandonment is very often a delivery question that nobody answered.
Look at where your orders actually come from and compare it with where you advertise. Merchants are regularly surprised, and the gap is usually cheap to close.
Test the search box on a mid-range Android phone. A search box that returns nothing useful for a two-word query on mobile is a large hole in a small screen.
Frequently Asked Questions
Free Peak Readiness Check
We will look at what your store is publicly telling search engines and where the obvious gaps are. Free, and you do not need to be a customer.
Back to the full checklist.