Fueled is partnering with Pantheon to make ElasticPress.io, our fast and flexible search solution, available to more organizations building content-rich digital experiences.
From content-centric websites with large libraries to online storefronts, search shapes how visitors find information and discover products. And expectations keep rising: shaped by AI experiences across the web, people increasingly expect search to understand a question and answer it directly.
When search is slow, brittle, or limited to basic keyword matching, the experience suffers at a moment when intent is high. ElasticPress provides a stronger foundation for fast, relevant discovery, and our partnership gives Pantheon customers access to enterprise-caliber search capabilities and support without separately orchestrating Elasticsearch infrastructure.
Better search, delivered through Pantheon
ElasticPress is a powerful, proven search solution for WordPress, built on Elasticsearch and refined over more than a decade of enterprise deployments. It takes over the out-of-the-box WordPress search experience and connects it to modern search infrastructure built for speed, relevance, and scale.
That foundation unlocks faster queries, smarter and more accurate results, and support for more complex content models. Results can be weighted by relevance and informed by content, metadata, custom fields, and other structured information, all of which can be tuned.
For WooCommerce-powered storefronts, customers quickly find the right product across even the largest catalogs. For publishers, universities, and other content-rich organizations, visitors get fast, relevant results from even the deepest archives. Editors feel the difference too: moving resource-intensive queries off the database makes managing and navigating large content libraries faster inside the WordPress admin.
With Pantheon, adopting ElasticPress no longer requires standing up or configuring search infrastructure. Customers can enable it directly from the Pantheon dashboard, and the platform handles provisioning and credentials automatically, with Fueled operating the search infrastructure behind the scenes. Pantheon announced the integration this spring, and it is now generally available.
Search that’s ready for AI
Fueled is focused on applying AI that measurably improves our clients’ digital experiences, and ElasticPress plays an important role for content-centered products. Recent releases have introduced features like AI-powered semantic search (understands meaning, not just keywords) and AI-generated answers drawn from a site’s own content.
Today, these capabilities ship inside ElasticPress Labs, a companion plugin for technical teams, and are powered by an organization’s preferred external AI model. And our team is already working on an easier-to-manage version inside the core product, with no third-party AI accounts to manage. One of several AI advances on our roadmap.
Search that understands meaning asks far more of the underlying infrastructure than keyword matching ever did. That’s where ElasticPress’s modern architecture pays off: the same structured index that speeds up everyday search is ready to store embeddings and power vector search. Teams that adopt ElasticPress for stronger search today are laying the groundwork for the discovery experiences their visitors and customers will expect next.
For developers, we’ve published an open source sample application that demonstrates what’s possible, and provides a code reference for building similar experiences, right down to exposing search and answers as tools AI agents can call. It uses ElasticPress.io as a vector knowledge store built on the Nobel Prize’s rich public laureate dataset.
The sample’s Ask AI experience answers plain-language questions with cited sources: ask which women have won the Physics prize, and it responds with Marie Curie and her fellow laureates, drawn directly from the indexed data. It can even reason across the full dataset, fielding questions like which country has produced the most Chemistry laureates. It’s the difference between searching a database and speaking with an expert.
Expanding ElasticPress beyond WordPress
The Pantheon partnership also points to increasing support for Elasticsearch-based search integrations and projects outside of WordPress.
Our ElasticPress plugin is purpose-built for WordPress, connecting it to Elasticsearch, indexing a site’s content, routing searches through that index, and adding new visitor-facing features that the index makes possible. On the other side is our optimized Elasticsearch infrastructure, operated by our team and tuned for content-rich websites, from secured search endpoints to the pipeline powering AI features. Our infrastructure’s capabilities, now available with Pantheon, are not WordPress-specific.
Pantheon supports customers on WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js; our infrastructure and experts can deliver custom search integrations for any of them, connecting the data source, structuring the index, generating embeddings, and shaping the search experience around the product’s content model. In fact, the Nobel Prize code sample runs entirely outside WordPress, no plugin involved, talking directly to our search infrastructure.
Bringing better search to more of the web
Our partnership with Pantheon puts stronger search, and the foundation for AI-powered discovery, within easier reach for every organization building on the platform, across WordPress and beyond.
Fueled and Pantheon are hosting a webinar on July 22 at 2 p.m. ET to walk through the partnership and see ElasticPress capabilities in action.
Visit ElasticPress.io to learn more about our search solutions and start a free trial. And for hosting providers and platform partners interested in offering ElasticPress to their own clients, let’s talk.
