Turning archive assets
into revenue, through search intelligence.
Bernal is a search engine installed on subscription media websites. Through intent-based search and measurement by membership tier, it turns a reader's search — the most honest first-party data there is — into decisions for editorial and business teams alike.
A shared challenge for subscription media
Archives that never become assets
Paying members search over 50x as often as non-members, yet the search box sits in an easy-to-miss spot on article pages — so archives rarely become an entry point.
Ever-rising acquisition costs
The cost of acquiring new subscribers keeps climbing, while improving retention among existing members is too often left for later.
"I couldn't find it" as a reason to cancel
Not being able to find the article you were after is a small but reliable reason members let their subscription lapse.
Search is the shortest route back into a buried archive
Of clicks that came through search, about 73% led to articles published more than 31 days earlier.
You can estimate your own version of this figure from your existing access logs alone.
Measured at a partner media site we work with
Bernal turns search into management data, along two axes
Intent-based search
Rather than matching keywords, we interpret what the reader is actually looking for — a design built to cut zero-result searches at the root.
Measurement by membership tier
We measure whether the person searching is a paying member, and make visible how search contributes to paywall conversion, billing and retention.
Search that understands intent moves the numbers this much
About 3.7x baseline
Well below typical industry levels
Search becomes a metric tied directly to membership growth
Where the 57x and 130x gaps actually come from
Change where the box sits, and how search gets used broadens too
When search lived mainly on article pages
Most searches came from readers who already knew which paid article they wanted — clear, purposeful queries.
After adding it to top pages too
Searches unrelated to any specific paid article — everyday lookups like a celebrity's latest news, sports scores, or current events — became noticeably more common.
Simple, usage-based pricing
Start with a free six-week trial to verify the impact — no new measurement set-up or tag changes required, and you can begin using your existing access logs alone.
Usage-based pricing tied to your number of paying members. Billed separately from your membership and paywall platform, so it has no bearing on your existing billing arrangements. Set-up cost: $0
Start small, and verify rigorously
Quick diagnostic
Carried out using your existing access logs alone, with no new tracking or tag changes required — we can estimate your version of the "about 73%" figure right away.
Building a measurement layer (optional)
Once the initial results look promising, we build a more precise layer to measure page views, time on page and visit frequency.
Ongoing improvement
We compare outcomes with and without search in use, confirming the impact in numbers as we expand step by step.
Why Bernal
It isn't a technical edge. What you choose to measure, and who reads the result, is where the real difference lies.
Different buyers need different units of measurement
We break results down by paying member, free member and non-member. Most search tools don't. That isn't a lack of technical ability — it's that the buyer is usually a web team. Only once you measure at this level does a difference like that 57x figure come into view.
We read the logs ourselves
We read every zero-result search, one by one. Our reports aren't auto-generated — which is exactly why we can't take on many publishers at once.
We don't call an inconclusive number conclusive
Before we start, we agree in writing on what success looks like, and on what would count as "no effect". We don't move the goalposts once work is under way.
Where we see this going
A search term is one of thousands of small signals readers send us about what they want. Bernal wants to live inside that data — making small discoveries continuously, and pointing media towards their next move. We call this presence a daemon: an intelligence that runs quietly in the background, turning what's buried in the data into order and value.
Start by showing us
your search logs.
Even a look at your existing search logs is often enough for us to tell you about patterns in zero-result searches, and where there's room to improve.
Get in touchFor partner and client media
Information publishers need for disclosure pages covering external transmission, where Bernal is installed on their site, is set out in our Privacy Policy. If you need anything confirmed individually, please get in touch.