Agency Case Study
How a Brisbane digital agency consolidated a 55-site estate into one and gave its client’s customers answers grounded in their own content, day and night.
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Agency |
Mettro, Brisbane, Australia. Founded 2001, 5,000+ projects across two decades |
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Client |
Carpet One |
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Products |
Keyword Search and AI Conversations |
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Project scope |
55-site WordPress multisite consolidated into a single site, with the search and conversational content discovery layer rebuilt on AddSearch |
“AddSearch’s AI Conversations does the search and the conversation in one. For us that matters because we work with clients whose customers research out of hours, long after the stores have shut, and this finally lets us answer them at the moment they’re looking, with answers locked to the client’s own content and shaped the way we want it. Better still, every conversation shows us what customers are actually asking, so we can feed that back and keep sharpening the site around them. I’d highly recommend it.“
Founder and Managing Director, Mettro
Keep readers on-page and engaged without redirecting them elsewhere. Deliver instant, accurate answers from your own website content.
When a long-standing client asked Mettro for a deceptively simple thing, one box, like Google, that answers whatever a customer wants to know, the agency knew its existing search could not get them there. Mettro was already consolidating the client’s 55-site estate into a single site, and the old search tool was both punishing the server and delivering little more than basic typeahead.
Mettro recommended AddSearch and built Keyword Search and AI Conversations into the new site. Customers can now find what they need quickly, and go deeper through a genuine multi-turn conversation grounded in the client’s own content. Just as valuable to the agency, every conversation is visible on the back end, giving Mettro a live view of what customers actually want to know and a steady stream of ideas for content to answer them better.
Mettro is a Brisbane digital agency founded in 2001, with a small senior team and a client base that tends to stay for the long haul, often more than a decade. The work spans website design and development, digital marketing, and ongoing support and maintenance, and over two decades it has added up to more than 6,000 projects.
The agency describes itself as deeply technical with a strong UX focus, and it has long been an advocate for content written with the customer front of mind, including writing specifically for AEO so it can be found and cited by AI tools, not only ranked by search engines. That same customer-first thinking shaped how the team approached search.
“We ruled out the chat-style interfaces early, because most of what we saw, certainly in Australia, was subpar. Because we work so heavily with AI tools ourselves, we knew a better solution was out there. We just had to find the right one.”
No one handed Mettro a brief to go and find a new search tool. The driver was simpler: a better experience for the client’s customers, and a growing sense that the existing search, while it did the job, was holding the team back.
Three threads came together.
A heavy estate to simplify. Mettro was replacing a 55-site multisite WordPress instance. Keeping that running carried a serious maintenance load, and the brief was to consolidate it into one site and surface content faster for an audience that is only getting more time-poor. Crucially, pulling 55 sites into one could not come at the cost of a fresh content burden.
A search tool that punished the server. Mettro monitors its servers closely, and the previous tool was causing severe performance spikes. Every time queries ran, it would hammer the server and drag performance down, tracing straight back to that tool. What it delivered in return was basic: typeahead and the simple things, with no real content discovery to surface the depth of content the team had worked so hard to build. The non-negotiable was speed.
A vision from the client. The client put it plainly: why can’t I just have one box, like Google, that gives me everything I want? Websites still need to work like websites, so no one was proposing a single field and nothing else. But it set the direction.
Underpinning all of it was an insight Mettro keeps coming back to.
“Leads don’t sleep. Most people researching flooring are doing it late at night, long after the stores have shut, and they want their questions answered then and there.”
Founder and Managing Director, Mettro
Mettro evaluated other options, but the decision turned out to be a straightforward one, and a lot of that came down to how AddSearch showed up.
The AddSearch team set up a demo using content from the client’s own site, so the team could see exactly how it would function. Straight away they could see it working, and working well. For a team as technical as Mettro, it mattered that the AddSearch team walked them through the back end too, answered every question, and made nothing feel like too much trouble.
“By the end it was a no-brainer to recommend. Honestly, it was easy.”
For an agency, the experience of building on a platform matters as much as the platform itself. This is where AddSearch stood apart for Mettro.
“The real difference with AddSearch came down to one thing: they actually worked with us. With most search tools we’ve implemented, you’re handed copious documentation and left to work it out yourself.”
Founder and Managing Director, Mettro
The handoff from the Sales team to the implementation team was smooth, a project manager stayed involved throughout, and the team was responsive and collaborative under a tight deadline as Mettro collapsed a 55-site setup down to one. As a technical, UX-focused agency, Mettro likes to own a fair bit of the front-end work to get things looking and behaving exactly the way it wants, and AddSearch left them room to do that while staying close throughout.
Carpet One’s new site runs Keyword Search and AI Conversations together, so fast keyword results and grounded conversational answers come from the same content. Two configuration choices show what Mettro was able to do with it.
With a large store network, each store selling differently, Mettro did not want AI Conversations giving generic answers like “here are some selected products.” So the team set parameters for how it handled product messaging, guiding people toward the Find a Store page where the local store could take over.
Mettro is exploring loading a full product catalogue into AI Conversations without surfacing that catalogue anywhere on the front end of the site. It sits in documents, gets imported into AI Conversations, and becomes available to customers only through the conversation itself. It is a way to give people access to depth the team could not otherwise put on the site, and AI Conversations handles it comfortably.
Behind both is the core capability Mettro was looking for: a genuine multi-turn conversation, with answers grounded in the site’s own content and backed by source citations, available at the exact moment a customer is looking.
“That’s the gap AI Conversations finally closed for us. It keeps a genuine multi-turn conversation going and answers grounded in the site’s own content, so customers get real answers at the moment they’re actually looking.”
Founder and Managing Director, Mettro
It is early days. The new site has not been live long, so Mettro is not putting numbers on the table yet. What has already changed is telling.
The biggest shift is that Mettro and the client can now see exactly what people are asking, in the real conversations happening day and night. Where generic tools and even big-name SEO platforms give signals at the end of the day, this gives actual conversations with actual customers.
Those conversations feed straight back into the site. Mettro can make targeted content updates and add new content to answer the questions customers are really asking, which suits a client that likes to work from data.
The path from a query through to an action has improved, and form fills are up. The new site is doing more of the heavy lifting on calls to action across the board, so it is not down to one thing, but AI Conversations is genuinely part of that improvement.
That answers the original brief. The project set out to take a huge amount of content, consolidate it, and surface it better and faster for a time-poor audience. People can now find what they need quickly, and through AI Conversations they can go deeper than a standard search would ever let them.
Mettro is already recommending AddSearch to other clients.
“Forget about chatbots, they’re dead. AI Conversations does the search and the conversation in one. Because it’s locked to your own content and because you can customise it so heavily, you can give customers an experience that’s genuinely worthy of them, not the generic, off-the-shelf thing they’ve come to expect. And that’s before you even get to the data you get out of it, which is amazing on its own.”
Founder and Managing Director, Mettro
Where does it earn its keep most? Mettro points to businesses sitting on genuinely great content, serving customers who do a lot of their research out of hours when there is nobody on hand to answer questions. Especially where the sale cannot be completed in a single online step and needs a store visit or a person at some point. That is where AI Conversations moves people further along, so by the time they make contact they are a warmer, clearer, better-informed lead.
“AddSearch’s AI Conversations does the search and the conversation in one. For us that matters because we work with clients whose customers research out of hours, long after the stores have shut, and this finally lets us answer them at the moment they’re looking, with answers locked to the client’s own content and shaped the way we want it. Better still, every conversation shows us what customers are actually asking, so we can feed that back and keep sharpening the site around them. I’d highly recommend it.”
Founder and Managing Director, Mettro
AddSearch partners with digital agencies like Mettro to bring fast Keyword Search and AI Conversations to their clients’ websites, from one platform and one index, with all capabilities available from day one. Answers are grounded in your client’s own content with source citations, and we work alongside your team through implementation and stay close throughout the build, so you can deliver a search and content discovery experience your clients’ customers genuinely want.
If you would like to see how a unified Keyword Search and AI Conversations experience could work for the sites you manage, we are happy to set up a personalized demo built on one of your client’s own websites, so you and your client can judge the fit together.
See how AddSearch can work for your organization with a personalized demo using your own content.
