By app · Intranet search

Intranet search engine: AI intranet search tools that search every app, not just the intranet

An intranet search engine indexes what your company publishes internally, usually SharePoint pages, policies and document libraries, and returns the matching results to employees. In most US companies the problem is not that this engine is broken. It is that only a fraction of any given answer lives on the intranet, and the intranet search engine is not permitted to look anywhere else. InSearch is an intranet search engine that also reads Slack, Google Drive, Notion, Confluence, Gmail, Jira and Salesforce, and returns one written answer with citations back to the exact source.

or ask a sample question ↓

One search · cited answers · permission-aware

Answer Console

Your files only

Drop your documents here PDF, DOCX, TXT, MD, CSV or a photo of a page. Up to 3 files.

Reading your files…

That request did not get through. Tap Ask InSearch again.

No account needed. Your files are read once to answer, then deleted, and never used to train any model.

Short answer

An intranet search engine indexes what is published on your intranet, usually SharePoint pages, policies and documents, and returns matching results to employees. The reason companies go looking for AI intranet search is that the intranet holds only part of the answer: the policy is published, but the exception that applies to it is in a Slack thread and the current numbers are in a Drive sheet. AI search across the intranet solves the ranking problem inside SharePoint. It does not solve the boundary problem, which is that most questions cross out of the intranet entirely. The tools worth evaluating are the ones that read the intranet and everything next to it, and enforce each person's existing permissions at query time.

There is a second, more mechanical reason intranet search underperforms, and it is documented rather than folklore. Microsoft publishes hard boundaries for SharePoint search. Parsing stops after 2 million characters of an item, the word breaker only tokenizes the first 1,000,000 characters, and crawl processing downloads at most 150 MB per file, extended to 512 MB for PDF, PPTX, PPT, DOC and DOCX, above which Microsoft states that only document metadata is downloaded and the full content remains unavailable for search. The sharpest one is rarely known: any item accessible to more than 10,000 distinct users or security groups is not searchable by any user at all. Long policy manuals, large decks and genuinely company-wide documents are exactly the content that meets those ceilings first.

Most writing on this subject comes from intranet platform vendors, and it points one way: replace the intranet. Sometimes that is the right call. If your intranet is an unmaintained file dump, publishing discipline and governance will do more for findability than any search product. But plenty of companies have already tidied the intranet and people still cannot find answers, because the missing half is in the apps beside it, and no amount of intranet hygiene reaches those.

InSearch connects to the intranet and to the rest of the stack, then answers the question rather than handing back a results page. Ask what the travel policy says about booking international flights and you get the answer in a couple of sentences, cited to the SharePoint policy page, the Slack thread where finance clarified the exception, and the current version of the form. Item-level permissions are inherited from each connected source and enforced per person at query time, so an answer never assembles itself out of something the reader could not already open.

Teams comparing this against the native Microsoft experience usually start with our SharePoint search tool page, and the honest cause list is in why SharePoint search is so bad. Because the answer rarely stops at the intranet boundary, searching across all company apps and workplace search cover the wider version of the same job, and knowledge management software covers the governance side.

Drive Slack Notion Confluence Jira Salesforce

Cited to source docs

Permission-aware · never trains on your data

Why it works

What your team gets with Intranet search

Searches past the intranet boundary

The intranet is one source among many. A single query covers SharePoint, Slack, Google Drive, Notion, Confluence, Gmail, Jira and Salesforce, so a question whose answer spans three systems comes back whole instead of a third at a time.

Answers, not a page of links

An intranet search engine that returns twelve blue links has moved the work rather than done it. InSearch writes the answer and cites the documents behind it, so checking the source takes one click instead of an afternoon of opening tabs.

Permission-aware per person

Item-level permissions are inherited from every connected source and re-checked at query time for whoever is asking. A company-wide rollout does not quietly widen who can read what, which is the failure mode that stalls most intranet search projects at the security review.

No re-platforming first

You do not have to migrate the intranet, move content or rebuild the information architecture before you get value. Connect the apps you already run and search works against them where they sit.

What it handles

One search, a cited answer, scoped to you

InSearch searches across every connected app, checks your permissions, and writes one clear answer with citations back to the exact source documents.

Answers from intranet content and the apps beside it
Cites the exact page, document or thread behind every answer
Plain English questions instead of keyword query syntax
Inherits SharePoint site and item-level permissions
Never trains on your company content

Answer Cited

Written answer

Full-time employees get 20 days of PTO per year plus 10 company holidays¹, requested in Workday with manager approval².

Only sources you can access

CF People Handbook · Time Off [1]

DR PTO-request-process.pdf [2]

Drive · Slack · Confluence Never trains on your data

Why InSearch

One search across every app, with a cited answer

Not eight separate search boxes, not a wall of blue links. InSearch unifies your apps and returns one written answer with citations, scoped to exactly what you can see.

One search, every app

Drive, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Gmail, Jira and Salesforce searched in a single query, so you stop opening a different search box for each tool.

A cited answer

A written answer in plain language with inline citations back to the exact source docs, so you can trust it and verify it instead of reading a page of links.

Permission-aware

It inherits and enforces each source's access controls at query time, so every person only ever sees answers from content they can already open. It never trains on your data.

AI search intranet: what does adding AI actually change?

It changes the matching, not the coverage, and that distinction is the whole reason so many intranet search projects disappoint. Classic intranet search matches the words you typed against the words in a page. AI search intranet tools match meaning, so a question phrased as a question can find a document that never uses those words, and the result can be a written answer rather than a list of links. That is a real improvement and it is worth having.

What it does not change is what got indexed. If your intranet contains 40 percent of the written answers in your company, AI makes that 40 percent dramatically easier to reach and leaves the other 60 percent exactly as invisible as it was. Teams often read a disappointing pilot as a relevance failure and go looking for a better ranking algorithm, when the actual problem is that the answer was never in the corpus.

The second thing AI does not fix by default is permissions. A semantic index that was built by crawling with an admin account will happily explain the contents of a document the person asking cannot open. Ask any vendor whether access is checked at query time against the source system or against a permissions copy refreshed on a schedule, and if it is a schedule, how long the interval is. That interval is how long a departed employee's access keeps working.

Why does intranet search feel worse than public web search?

Because the two problems are not alike, and the comparison everyone makes in frustration is unfair in a specific way. Public web search has billions of documents with links between them, so popularity and authority are measurable signals. Your intranet has no link graph worth the name: nobody links to the expense policy, so there is no signal that it is the authoritative one rather than the 2019 draft sitting next to it.

Then there is the duplication. Intranets accumulate near-identical documents, and the search engine has no way to know which is current unless somebody told it. Add the fact that a large share of intranet content is inside files rather than pages, where crawlers hit real limits on size and parse time, and the experience people complain about starts to look inevitable rather than negligent. We documented the specific published limits in why SharePoint search is so bad.

The fix that works is less about the engine and more about scope. Give the search layer access to the systems where current answers actually live, make it cite what it used so a reader can judge freshness themselves, and accept that governance, deciding which document is authoritative, stays a human job.

What should an AI intranet search tool connect to besides the intranet?

At minimum: the chat tool, the file store, the ticket system and email. In most companies that means Slack or Teams, Google Drive or SharePoint, Jira, and Gmail or Outlook, plus whichever wiki the engineering side actually uses, which is usually Confluence or Notion. The test is not the length of the connector list but whether it covers the specific places your last ten unanswered questions were eventually resolved.

This is where intranet-only tools and full workplace search genuinely diverge. An intranet search product is scoped to a publishing platform by design, which makes it simpler to deploy and permanently blind to conversation. Since a large share of institutional knowledge in most companies was never published anywhere and only ever explained once in a thread, that blindness is expensive.

InSearch reads Drive, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Gmail, Jira and Salesforce in one query and returns a written answer with citations to the exact sources, with each person's existing permissions applied at query time. The console at the top of this page runs against real content if you want to see the shape of it. For the wider version of the same job, see search across all company apps and unified search.

Good questions

Questions about Intranet search

An intranet search engine indexes the content published on a company intranet, typically pages, policies and documents in SharePoint, and returns matching results to employees. Newer AI intranet search tools add a layer on top: people ask a question in plain English and get a written answer with citations, rather than a ranked list of links to open one by one.

Usually two reasons at once. The intranet search engine only indexes the intranet, so any answer that also lives in Slack, Drive or Jira comes back incomplete. And SharePoint search has published boundaries: parsing stops at 2 million characters per item, and files above 150 MB, or 512 MB for PDF and Office formats, have only their metadata indexed.

Scope. Intranet search covers one system, the intranet itself. Enterprise search covers every system employees work in, including the intranet plus chat, cloud storage, wikis, ticketing and CRM. If the answers your team needs are spread wider than the intranet, intranet search is addressing a subset of the actual problem.

Yes. For most US companies SharePoint, surfaced through Microsoft Search, is the intranet search engine. It indexes SharePoint sites, libraries and lists and honors permissions properly. Its real limitation is reach rather than quality: it sees Microsoft 365 content, so a question answered partly in Slack, Notion or Salesforce returns partial results.

Start with the free fixes. Confirm that Allow this site to appear in Search results is set to Yes, check the same setting on each document library, and request a reindex after any managed property change, because Microsoft states the crawler will not reindex a schema change on its own. When the content is scattered across other apps, no configuration setting reaches it and you need cross-app search.

Yes. An AI intranet search tool indexes the intranet and answers questions about it in plain English, citing the pages it used. The ones worth paying for also index the apps beside the intranet, because in practice the policy is published on the intranet and the exception to it was agreed in a chat thread nobody wrote up.

Judge four things: which systems it indexes beyond the intranet, whether it returns a cited answer or only links, whether it enforces item-level permissions per person at query time, and whether your content is used to train models. Reach and permission handling are where most intranet search tools quietly fall short.

It should, and SharePoint search does. The risk appears when you add a search layer across several systems, because permissions then have to be inherited from every source and re-checked for each person at query time. InSearch works that way, so nobody receives an answer assembled from a document they could not already open.

Read every enterprise search question

Explore more

Give your team one place to find every answer.

One search across all your company apps, a clear cited answer, scoped to exactly what each person can see, and never trained on your data.

See pricing

One search across every app · cited answers · permission-aware · never trains on your data