A practical guide to ServiceNow AI Search Analytics in 2025

Let's be honest, a bad search bar is a fast track to frustrated users and a pile of new support tickets. When an employee can't find a simple policy or a customer gives up on self-service, it’s a problem. A good search experience isn't just a nice-to-have; it's your first line of defense.

If you’re running on ServiceNow, "ServiceNow AI Search Analytics" is the built-in toolset meant to help you figure out how well your search is actually doing. It’s designed to give you a peek into what your users are looking for and whether they're coming up empty-handed.

In this guide, we'll walk through what these analytics are all about, which metrics you should actually pay attention to, and how to turn all that data into real improvements. We'll also get into some common roadblocks you'll probably hit and what you can do about them.

What is ServiceNow AI Search Analytics?

So, what exactly is "ServiceNow AI Search Analytics"? It's not one single dashboard, but more of a toolkit inside ServiceNow that shows you what’s happening with your search bar. Think of it as a window into your users' minds, helping you see what they're looking for and whether they're actually finding it.

It's mostly broken down into two main areas:

1. AI Search Analytics Dashboard: This is your user-focused hub. It tracks what people are typing into the search bar, what they're clicking on, and if they're interacting with special features like Genius Results.

2. AI Search Dashboard: This one is more of a high-level, admin-style overview. It tells you things like how many documents are indexed for search and how your different search profiles are set up.

The whole point of these tools is to give you the data you need to answer some big questions: Are we writing the right knowledge articles? Can people actually find them? Where are the gaps in our content? By digging into these analytics, you can stop guessing what users want and start knowing what they need.

Understanding the key metrics in your ServiceNow AI Search Analytics dashboard

Alright, so you’ve opened the dashboard and you're staring at a wall of charts and numbers. It can be a lot. While everything has its place, a few key metrics really tell the story of your search quality. If you only have time to look at a few things, make it these.

How to use ServiceNow AI Search Analytics to improve your search results

Okay, you've got the data. Now what? These numbers are useless unless you turn them into actual improvements for your users. Here’s how to get started.

Turn "Queries with No Results" into new content

Your "Queries with No Results" report is a goldmine. It's a direct, unfiltered feed of what your users are looking for but can't find. Don't let that valuable intel go to waste.

Make it a regular habit to export the top queries from this report and share it with your content or knowledge management team. This isn't just vague feedback; it's a data-driven roadmap for what to create next. Building articles around these queries means you're spending time on content you know people need.

Fine-tune relevance for underperforming queries

What about those searches that show results, but nobody clicks on them? Or when your "Top Queries" report shows an average click position of 5 or higher? This usually means the right content might exist somewhere, but it's buried.

ServiceNow gives you a few knobs to turn to fix this:

• Result Improvement Rules: These are your best friend for manual tuning. You can "Boost" results from a trusted source (like your official "Company Policies" knowledge base), "Promote" a specific article to the top for a certain query (like pinning the "Password Reset Guide" for "reset password"), or "Block" old, outdated pages from ever showing up again.

• Synonyms: Your users don't always use the "official" company jargon. The synonyms dictionary lets you bridge that gap. For example, you can connect "WFH policy," "work from home," and "telecommuting" all to your official "Remote Work Guidelines" article so it shows up no matter what they type.

• Meta Field: Ever have keywords you want an article to rank for, but they feel clunky in the actual text? The "meta" field on knowledge articles is the perfect spot for them. It gives the search engine extra hints without making the article awkward to read.

Common challenges of ServiceNow AI Search Analytics (and how to solve them)

Now, for the reality check. While these analytics tools are powerful, they aren't always a walk in the park. Let's talk about a few common headaches teams run into.

Complex setup and tricky permissions

Just getting the dashboards to show up can be a chore. You need the right plugins installed, like "Advanced AI Search Management Tools," and sometimes, as users have discovered, you have to poke around in system properties just to get data to start flowing.

A bigger pain point is permissions. The documentation often says you need the "ais_admin" role to see all the data. The problem with that? The role also grants permission to change the search configuration. This leaves you with a tough choice: either give your monitoring team more power than they need, or have them fly blind on important metrics.

This is a stark contrast to modern tools like eesel AI, which are built for simplicity. You can connect your helpdesk (like Zendesk or Jira Service Management) and knowledge sources in a few clicks, without needing a developer or fighting with complicated permission settings.

Difficulty validating and testing changes

So you added a new synonym or a boost rule. Did it work? The scary part is that a change improving one search might accidentally break ten others. The official advice is to create a "Golden Set", a manually curated list of important queries and their ideal results, and test against it every single time you make a change. It's a solid idea in theory, but it's also a ton of work to build and maintain.

This is where a different approach can save you a lot of time and guesswork. eesel AI tackles this with a simulation mode. Instead of manually checking a handful of queries, you can run your new AI setup against thousands of your past support tickets. It shows you exactly how it would have performed, giving you a real forecast of its impact before it ever interacts with a live user.

The eesel AI simulation mode provides a clear forecast of how changes will impact search performance, a key advantage over traditional ServiceNow AI Search Analytics.

Reporting challenges: Insight without action

The standard dashboards in ServiceNow are a decent starting point, but many teams find they outgrow them quickly. As some in the ServiceNow community have pointed out, the dashboards often only show the top 5 or so queries, which makes it hard to see the full picture. If you want to combine search data with other info, like from your knowledge base table, you're left building custom reports from scratch.

While ServiceNow's dashboard shows you what happened, platforms like eesel AI are built to help you do something about it. Its reporting doesn't just show what users are searching for; it automatically flags specific gaps in your knowledge. It can even analyze successful ticket resolutions and help you draft new articles based on them, ensuring you're building a knowledge base with content that’s already proven to solve real problems.

eesel AI's reporting dashboard automatically identifies knowledge gaps, offering more actionable insights than standard ServiceNow AI Search Analytics.

ServiceNow AI Search Analytics pricing

So, what's this going to cost? That's the tricky part. ServiceNow doesn't post a public price list for AI Search. It's usually included in their higher-tier platform licenses (Pro or Enterprise), which means you have to get a custom quote from their sales team. This can make it hard to budget for, especially if you aren't already on one of those plans.

eesel AI: A simpler, more powerful alternative for search and support automation

If you've been reading about the setup headaches and manual tuning and thinking, "there has to be an easier way," you're not wrong. This is where a tool like eesel AI comes into the picture. It was built from the ground up to sidestep these exact challenges.

• Get up and running in minutes, not months: It’s a self-serve platform with one-click integrations for help desks like Zendesk and Freshdesk, chat tools like Slack, and knowledge sources like Confluence and Google Docs.

• Test changes without the guesswork: Use the simulation engine to see exactly how the AI will perform on your real-world tickets before you flip the switch for users. No more crossing your fingers and hoping a change didn't break anything.

• Bring all your knowledge together: Train your AI on everything from past tickets and help centers to internal wikis. This gives you a single source of truth for truly comprehensive and accurate answers.

• Clear and predictable pricing: Our pricing plans are straightforward. You know exactly what you're paying without worrying about surprise fees.

eesel AI offers transparent pricing plans, a clear alternative to the custom quotes required for ServiceNow AI Search Analytics.

Get actionable insights from your support data today

At the end of the day, "ServiceNow AI Search Analytics" gives you a solid set of tools to see what's going on with your search. But getting the most out of it takes real effort, in setup, regular tuning, and digging through the data. For teams that need to see results faster without a dedicated analytics person, modern AI platforms offer a more direct path from data to action.

Ready for analytics you can actually do something with? Try eesel AI for free and connect your knowledge sources in under five minutes. See for yourself how simple and powerful AI-driven support can be.