Enterprise Search Vendors in 2026: Who Got Acquired, Frozen or Retired

If you built an enterprise search shortlist two years ago and picked it back up this month, roughly half of it has changed hands, changed shape, or stopped taking new customers. That is not a narrative anyone published; it is just what happens when you check each vendor's own filings and notices one after another.

Here is the ledger, with what each event actually means for someone buying now.

Amazon Kendra: frozen, not dead

AWS placed Kendra into maintenance mode effective June 30, 2026, and it stops accepting new customers on July 30, 2026. Existing customers keep a fully supported service with bug fixes and security updates. What they do not get is new features, ever.

Be precise about this one, because it gets overstated. There is no published end of life, no retirement date, and nobody is switching your index off. AWS's recommended path for both migrations and new builds is Amazon Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base, which reached general availability on June 17, 2026, thirteen days before Kendra was frozen.

The practical catch is that the replacement is a different kind of thing. Kendra shipped 32 native connectors; the managed knowledge base ships seven. AWS's own migration guide lists faceted search, query suggestions, custom synonyms, spell checking, incremental learning and custom document enrichment as features requiring workarounds you build. We went through that work in detail in what you actually have to rebuild when migrating off Kendra.

Elastic Workplace Search: genuinely gone

This is the one that surprises people, because the messaging was gentle. Elastic announced the retirement of Enterprise Search, which contained both App Search and Workplace Search, on April 15, 2025. It was not deprecated in 9.0, it was removed. There is no standalone Enterprise Search 9.x build, so you cannot upgrade into it at all.

End of maintenance is January 15, 2027 and end of support is July 15, 2027. Elastic's guidance is to migrate to Elasticsearch itself, using the Search UI library for the frontend, self-managed connectors for content, and Open Crawler for web pages. Your data survives and stays queryable. The product around it does not, which is why the Workplace Search migration is a rebuild rather than an upgrade.

Sinequa: still selling, now French-owned

ChapsVision, a French data intelligence group, acquired Sinequa in November 2024 alongside a $90 million funding round. The product is very much alive and now trades as Sinequa by ChapsVision, with the group leaning into sovereign, regulated and air-gapped deployments.

Nothing here is bad news for customers, and no sunset has been announced. It is a change of context rather than a change of product: Sinequa is now a business unit inside a group with a defense and sovereignty focus, rather than an independent search vendor. If you are a US buyer whose knowledge lives in Slack and Notion, that is worth knowing before the first call, mostly because it tells you who the product is being built for. Our full Sinequa comparison goes through where it genuinely wins.

Moveworks: the biggest one, and the most misreported

ServiceNow announced its acquisition of Moveworks on March 10, 2025 at $2.85 billion. That is the number nearly every article still repeats, and it is not what was paid. ServiceNow's own annual report puts the actual consideration at $2.4 billion, and the deal closed on December 15, 2025.

ServiceNow says Moveworks continues to be offered as a standalone product, and no end of life has been announced. At the same time, at Knowledge 2026 in May it launched Otto, which combines Now Assist, Moveworks and AI Experience into one experience that ServiceNow says will roll out across all products in the year ahead. Moveworks founder Bhavin Shah is now a senior vice president and general manager there.

Both things are true, and the honest reading sits between them: nobody is retiring Moveworks, and nobody should pretend it is still an independent point tool either. Buying it in 2026 is closer to making a ServiceNow platform decision. Our Moveworks comparison lays out where it still wins, and it wins in real places.

What actually changed for buyers

Four unrelated events do not make a conspiracy. They do make a pattern, and it has practical consequences for an evaluation you run this quarter.

1. Vendor continuity is now a real evaluation criterion

It used to be enough to compare features and price. When two of your four finalists have changed owners inside eighteen months and a third is frozen, "who will own this product in three years, and what will they want it to be" stops being a paranoid question. Ask it in the first call and write down the answer.

2. Absorption is the common ending, not shutdown

Notice what did not happen: nothing got switched off. Kendra runs. Moveworks sells. Sinequa ships. The pattern is absorption, where a product keeps working while its roadmap is redirected toward the parent's strategy. That is much harder to plan around than a clean sunset, because there is never a date that forces your hand. The cost arrives slowly, as the thing you bought gradually becomes a feature of something you did not buy.

3. Pricing tends to follow ownership

None of these vendors publish enterprise search pricing you can read on a page. Kendra publishes AWS rates, and Microsoft publishes Copilot's $30 per user per month, but Sinequa, Moveworks and Coveo all route you to a quote. When a vendor changes hands, the commercial model usually follows within a renewal cycle or two, which is a reason to know what you are actually spending across your SaaS and cloud subscriptions before the renewal email arrives, not after.

4. The migration is never the API

The clearest lesson from both the Kendra and Elastic notices is that the expensive part is never the code. AWS tells Kendra customers to rebuild connector sync pipelines with Lambda. Elastic tells Workplace Search customers their content sources "need to be replaced with self-managed Elastic connectors." In both cases the vendor is transferring managed operational work back to the customer, in polite language, and the work is measured in quarters.

How to run an evaluation now

1. Ask who owns the vendor and what the parent wants. Not gossip. A roadmap under a new owner bends toward that owner's strategy, and you will live with the result.
2. Ask what is published. A vendor that publishes its pricing has made a commitment you can hold it to. A quote is a negotiation that repeats every renewal.
3. Count the connectors you actually need, by name. Not the marketing total. Sinequa claims 200 or more; its published list names roughly 130, and Slack and Notion are not on it. Bedrock's managed knowledge base has seven. The number that matters is how many of your systems are covered.
4. Separate answers from actions. Moveworks resolves tickets. Search tools return answers. These are different purchases that look similar in a demo, and buying the wrong one is expensive.
5. Assume you will migrate again. Given the last eighteen months, plan for it: how does your data come out, and what does the exit actually cost?

If your knowledge lives in the modern SaaS stack and you want the narrow version of this, InSearch does one thing: it searches Google Drive, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Gmail, Jira and Salesforce in one query and returns a written answer with inline citations, scoped to what each person can already open, and it never trains on your data. It is independent, priced per seat in public, and it is not on its way to becoming a feature of something larger.

Frequently asked questions

Is Amazon Kendra discontinued?

No. Kendra entered maintenance mode on June 30, 2026 and stops accepting new customers on July 30, 2026, but AWS has published no end of life or shutdown date. Existing customers keep a fully supported service with bug fixes and security updates, without new features. AWS recommends Amazon Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base for migrations and new builds.

Who bought Moveworks?

ServiceNow. The deal was announced March 10, 2025 at $2.85 billion and closed December 15, 2025, with ServiceNow's annual report recording the actual consideration at $2.4 billion. Moveworks is still sold standalone, and in May 2026 ServiceNow launched Otto, which combines Now Assist, Moveworks and AI Experience into a single experience.

Who owns Sinequa?

ChapsVision, a French data intelligence company, acquired Sinequa in November 2024 alongside a $90 million funding round. It now trades as Sinequa by ChapsVision and emphasizes sovereign, regulated and air-gapped deployments.

Is Elastic Workplace Search discontinued?

Yes. Elastic announced the retirement of Enterprise Search, including Workplace Search, on April 15, 2025 and removed it entirely in version 9.0. The 8.x line reaches end of maintenance on January 15, 2027 and end of support on July 15, 2027. There is no 9.x version to upgrade to.

What should I do if my vendor gets acquired?

Do not panic, and do not assume nothing changed. Acquisitions in this market have led to absorption rather than shutdown, so your product keeps working while its roadmap drifts toward the parent's priorities. Confirm your contract terms and renewal price, ask directly what happens to the standalone product, find out how your data comes out, and reassess at renewal rather than mid-contract.