Announcing our 2026 Superstars of Search Award winners: Coppel and Wesco

Our second annual Superstars of Search Awards are here, and if I am being honest, choosing this year’s winners was even more difficult than last year. Last year, I said our clients had set an incredibly high bar. This year, they raised it again.

Today, I am excited to recognize two standout organizations: Coppel and Wesco. One reimagined its digital commerce experience from the ground up. The other built a search experience so useful that customers engage with it on nearly half of all visits, an exceptional signal of just how central search has become to the customer journey.

They are very different companies solving very different challenges, but both arrived at the same conclusion: search is not just a website feature, it is the foundational infrastructure. When treated that way, every part of the customer experience and business performance improves.

What stands out most in both stories is their focus. Neither team set out simply to build a better search bar. They set out to build a better business, and expanding search into a broader product discovery experience became one of the most effective ways to make that happen.

Meet our 2026 award winners

Coppel wins the Business Transformation Award, for the second year running

Yes, you read that right. Coppel is back.

Last year, Coppel earned our Innovation Award for a machine learning model that predicted product types during indexing. It was a smart, high-impact innovation that helped drive a 58% lift in product page views during El Buen Fin. Many teams would have treated that as a milestone and moved on.

Coppel did the opposite. They used that momentum to strengthen the foundation underneath the experience.

Over the first half of 2025, Coppel, one of Mexico’s largest retail and financial services groups, undertook a major rebuild of the ecommerce platform powering its digital commerce experience, with Lucidworks Search integrated to power the end to end product discovery experience. The team launched a new data source system and ecommerce platform, creating a modern foundation designed to support the fast, relevant, and intuitive product discovery experiences customers expect every time they head to the website or open the app.

Lucidworks Search helped power that transformation, evolving search from a legacy capability into a foundational part of Coppel’s next-generation product discovery experience. More importantly, Coppel expanded that intelligence well beyond the search box. The team extended Lucidworks Search’s role to power browse, recommendations, and product detail pages, ensuring the same intelligence that surfaces the right product in search also shapes the broader discovery journey. They also introduced frequent price and inventory updates, a less visible but essential improvement that helps reduce friction and protect against the disappointment of finding out too late that a product is unavailable.

With its new ecommerce foundation in place, Coppel is continuing to modernize and evolve the customer experience, expanding its use of AI-powered search, Neural Hybrid Search (NHS), and Lucidworks AI capabilities to make discovery more intelligent, personalized, and intuitive. Coppel is continuously innovating and Lucidworks is helping them deliver increasingly relevant experiences across the customer journey.

Luis Felipe Arceo Cassani, Product Manager for Product Discovery and Selection at Coppel, put it better than I could: “Lucidworks has been a key partner in rethinking our digital commerce experience. We chose their platform for its flexibility and its ability to adapt to our business needs, backed by a truly supportive partnership. It gives us the agility we need to serve our customers better today and keep innovating for the future.”

Two awards in two consecutive years, which as far as I know makes Coppel the first client recognized in both years of this program. That’s not luck. That’s a team that treats digital discovery as a permanent commitment rather than a project with an end date.

Wesco wins the Search Superhero Award for Commerce

For a B2B commerce site, we see an average of 30-40% search usage and with search users converting roughly 3x the rate of non-searchers, Wesco has one of the highest intent and highest value experiences making an impact on revenue and customer engagement with 49% of site visitors who interact with search. Nearly half of everyone who shows up.

To appreciate why that’s remarkable, you have to know what Wesco’s search is up against. Wesco is a global industrial distribution and supply chain solutions provider, and its catalog is the kind of thing that keeps search engineers awake at night: enormous, deeply technical, full of near-identical SKUs where one wrong character means the wrong part arrives on a job site. Their customers aren’t browsing for inspiration. They know what they need, it has to be exactly right, and they need it now. That is the reality of product discovery in B2B commerce, and it is unforgiving.

That’s the context for 49%. Users abandon search the moment it fails them. They learn to route around it, and they don’t come back. When half your visitors keep choosing the search bar, query after query, on a catalog this unforgiving, it means the team behind it has earned their trust.

And the trust is well placed: 68.3% of Wesco’s search sessions end with a customer engaging a product. Search is also measurably influencing commerce revenue, demonstrating a clear connection between search engagement, buyer intent, and revenue outcomes.

Then Wesco did something I find even more interesting. They deployed Fusion across both commerce and knowledge management. Same platform, one foundation, serving customers on the storefront and employees behind the scenes. That’s search as an operational capability rather than a point solution, and it’s a pattern I expect to see a lot more of.

What stands out:

• 49% search usage among site visitors, the strongest vote of confidence a search experience can get
• 68.3% search success rate, meaning most search sessions end with a customer engaging a product
• Measurable commerce revenue influenced by search, traceable back to the experience itself
• Enterprise-wide deployment, with Fusion powering both commerce and knowledge management

Akash Khurana, Chief Information and Digital Officer at Wesco, described it this way: “Search has become an important capability in our digital ecosystem. Working with Lucidworks, we’ve been able to transform how our customers and employees find information, and we can see the direct impact on our business results every day.”

And they’re not finished. Wesco continues to scale its AI search initiatives to support growing data volumes, which means the experience their customers get next year should be better still.

Why these wins matter

Here’s the thing about my job: I get a front-row seat to the moment search stops being treated as a technical issue and starts being understood as a business priority.

It often begins with small signals. Zero-result searches start climbing. Merchandisers spend more time manually boosting products than shaping strategy. Then the real question surfaces: what is this costing the business? That is when search moves out of the backlog and into the boardroom.

That is exactly what happened here. Coppel saw that the real constraint was not its catalog, but the platform underpinning the experience. Wesco saw that search had become one of the most frequently used touchpoints in its digital journey and gave it the investment that reality demanded. Neither insight is automatic. Both require teams that trust the data enough to act on it.

When a Coppel customer finds the right product and it is available to buy, or when a Wesco customer finds the right part number immediately and keeps work moving, that is the outcome that matters. Search does not have to call attention to itself to create value. In many cases, the best search experiences are the ones customers barely notice because everything simply works.

Our role as your technology partner

As Lucidworks’ Chief Client Officer, I have the best view of client success in the company. We build the platform, drive the innovation behind it, and bring the expertise to help clients deliver at scale. But our clients are the ones who turn that into experiences that matter to real people: a contractor sourcing a part, a family shopping for a refrigerator.

They also make us better. Coppel’s work across browse, recommendations, and product detail page content sharpened our thinking around unified discovery. Wesco’s deployment across both commerce and knowledge management reinforced what clients expect from a single platform. Their feedback continues to shape our roadmap, and it always will.

Celebrating client success

To Coppel and Wesco: thank you for letting us be a part of this, and for being willing to share it publicly. That generosity helps the entire search community learn faster.

To every client reading this, you inspire us. We’re already looking forward to what you’ll bring to next year’s awards.

The spotlight is yours. Keep building search experiences that wow your customers.

The Superstars of Search Awards celebrate Lucidworks clients who deliver exceptional search and discovery experiences through innovative technology implementation and measurable business results. Read the press release for more information.