StretchSearch

StretchSearch is the StretchSuite platform for governed site search, crawling, indexing, and ranking. It is the enterprise alternative to hosted search services like Algolia — but built the other way around. Instead of pointing a crawler at the web and hoping for the best, StretchSearch puts authorization, robots policy, risk level, rate limits, and an approval workflow in front of every crawl. Nothing is fetched until a target is authorized and a crawl job is reviewed and approved, so you can index owned and client-authorized properties with a clear, auditable trail.

Who it's for

StretchSearch is for teams who need search and site intelligence they can defend: SEO and content teams auditing owned sites, agencies crawling client-authorized properties, brand and competitive researchers, and platform teams who want a retrieval layer that grounds AI answers in real, citable evidence. Two audiences share the product — everyday workspace users who organize and review work, and platform operators who hold the governed controls (crawler execution, generation of findings and rankings, and the master kill switch).

What you can do

• Organize work into projects. Group targets, crawl jobs, findings, and rankings by initiative — an owned-site audit, a client engagement, competitor research, or an SEO-intelligence sweep.
• Register and authorize crawl targets. Record the domains you're allowed to crawl along with their authorization status, robots-policy review, allowed domains/prefixes, and risk level.
• Configure governed crawl jobs. Define seed URLs, crawl scope, depth, page caps, and rate limits, then move the job through a readiness checklist and approval before any execution is enabled.
• Review SEO intelligence. Read prioritized, severity-ranked findings (missing titles, thin content, duplicate metadata, non-200 pages, and more) with a rolled-up SEO health score.
• Explore candidate indexing. Inspect the keywords, phrases, entities, page chunks, and chunk references extracted from indexed pages — the raw material that feeds ranking and retrieval.
• Study ranking previews. See how the deterministic StretchRank engine scores and orders candidates, with transparent score components you can audit.
• Run federated search. Query across projects, pages, targets, crawl jobs, SEO findings, and rankings from one box, with facets and saved/recent searches.
• Ground AI with evidence. Pull retrieval context and evidence packages so other StretchSuite apps (like StretchGPT) can answer with cited, first-party evidence instead of guesses.
• Monitor and control safety. Watch the crawl-audit feed and rely on a master kill switch that can halt crawler activity instantly.

The governance-first model

StretchSearch treats crawling as a privileged action. Crawler execution is disabled by default. Registering a target or creating a crawl job never starts a live crawl — it creates a governed record that moves through authorization, a readiness checklist, and an approval gate. Every mutation on the operator surface is protected by scoped action tokens, and read surfaces are transparent about state (you'll frequently see crawler_enabled: false reflected in the UI). This is deliberate: it's what lets enterprise and agency teams prove what they crawled, why they were allowed to, and who approved it.

How it fits the suite

StretchSearch is infrastructure, not a reporting product. It supplies the crawl, index, and evidence layer that other StretchSuite apps consume:

• StretchBAS (brand audit and reporting) turns StretchSearch evidence into client-facing audits.
• StretchSEM / StretchSEO consume SEO findings and keyword/entity candidates.
• StretchGPT and other AI surfaces call the evidence bridge to answer questions with grounded, citable context.
• Federated search spans the wider suite (projects, crawler, SEO) so a single query reaches everything your organization has indexed.

Where to start

New to StretchSearch? Begin with Getting Started with StretchSearch for the core concepts and your first project, then read The Authorization, Governance & Safety Model to understand the controls. From there, the Guides category walks you through targets, crawl jobs, and readiness end to end, and the Features category is your reference for every capability. If something isn't behaving as expected, the Troubleshooting and FAQ categories cover the most common questions.