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Your members have started typing full questions into your site search — and there’s a decent chance your site search is still just answering back with a list of links. The fix everyone is selling now is “AI search” — usually sold as a single product you attach to the side of your CMS — but the scope of “AI search” is much more than a single product. It’s a spectrum that runs from small (improved keyword search that uses AI to help make better connections) to large — typically a full chatbot that answers in plain language. Blend's director of development, Bob Davidson, walks through the whole spectrum — semantic search, RAG, chatbots — and how to figure out which one actually fits your content and your audience. It mostly boils down to a classic computing metaphor: garbage in, garbage out — a chatbot pointed at thin or stale content will answer fast and wrong, which is worse than no chatbot at all. If you’re weighing AI search for your association or credit union site, start here.

Blend Interactive is a selected partner for Optimizely Project Greenlight. A faster upgrade with expert support. Are You Ready to Upgrade?

Optimizely CMS 13 is ready, and the upgrade path is different for every team. Are you ready? Our two-question self-audit will help uncover your path — from light lift to full migration.

Association content can be free or gated. If it's free, what does membership offer? If it's locked away, nobody sees the value. In other words, it's a question of when, not if.

It’s really easy to be wowed by a personalization demo, because they’re designed to play to your pain points. They promise efficiency, and they promise ease. But they often forget one of the biggest road bumps: somebody has to run the thing, and that somebody might be you. When they show you how the homepage rearranges itself for a new member, remember that somebody has to run that thing. That magic needs someone to tag the pages, write the content, and keep them current — and that someone (maybe you!) is already busy running a newsletter and wrangling an events calendar. This is especially true within professional and member associations, where the need is high and the budget is low. The good news is that the work that those personalization demos promise is possible, over time. It just takes a bit of reframing. Pick one moment — for most associations that's new-member onboarding — and focus on that. Structure the content behind it, get it set up, and test its effectiveness. Then — and ONLY then — begin to expand as fast as your team can keep up.

Search is changing, and answer engines like ChatGPT and Claude are leading the way. The sites that adapt now will be the ones people find later. Start with our free AI Search Readiness checklist.