Senior Software Engineer

Fueled and Pantheon partner to bring enterprise-grade search to more digital experiences. July 16, 2026 by Thorsten Ott Fueled is partnering with Pantheon to make ElasticPress.io, its fast and flexible search solution, available to more organizations building content-rich digital experiences. From content-centric websites with large libraries to online storefronts, search shapes how visitors find information and discover products. And expectations keep rising: shaped by AI experiences across the web, people increasingly expect search to understand a question and answer it directly. When search is slow, brittle, or limited to basic keyword matching, the experience suffers at a moment when intent is high. ElasticPress provides a stronger foundation for fast, relevant discovery, and its partnership gives Pantheon customers access to enterprise-caliber search capabilities and support without separately orchestrating Elasticsearch infrastructure. Better search, delivered through Pantheon. ElasticPress is a powerful, proven search solution for WordPress, built on Elasticsearch and refined over more than a decade of enterprise deployments. It takes over the out-of-the-box WordPress search experience and connects it to modern search infrastructure built for speed, relevance, and scale. That foundation unlocks faster queries, smarter and more accurate results, and support for more complex content models. Results can be weighted by relevance and informed by content, metadata, custom fields, and other structured information, all of which can be tuned. For WooCommerce-powered storefronts, customers quickly find the right product across even the largest catalogs. For publishers, universities, and other content-rich organizations, visitors get fast, relevant results from even the deepest archives. Editors feel the difference too: moving resource-intensive queries off the database makes managing and navigating large content libraries faster inside the WordPress admin. With Pantheon, adopting ElasticPress no longer requires standing up or configuring search infrastructure. Customers can enable it directly from the Pantheon dashboard, and the platform handles provisioning and credentials automatically, with Fueled operating the search infrastructure behind the scenes. Pantheon announced the integration this spring, and it is now generally available. Search that's ready for AI. Fueled is focused on applying AI that measurably improves its clients' digital experiences, and ElasticPress plays an important role for content-centered products. Recent releases have introduced features like AI-powered semantic search (understands meaning, not just keywords) and AI-generated answers drawn from a site's own content. Today, these capabilities ship inside ElasticPress Labs, a companion plugin for technical teams, and are powered by an organization's preferred external AI model. And its team is already working on an easier-to-manage version inside the core product, with no third-party AI accounts to manage. One of several AI advances on its roadmap. Search that understands meaning asks far more of the underlying infrastructure than keyword matching ever did. That's where ElasticPress's modern architecture pays off: the same structured index that speeds up everyday search is ready to store embeddings and power vector search. Teams that adopt ElasticPress for stronger search today are laying the groundwork for the discovery experiences their visitors and customers will expect next. For developers, ElasticPress 2.5 has published an open source sample application that demonstrates what's possible, and provides a code reference for building similar experiences, right down to exposing search and answers as tools AI agents can call. It uses ElasticPress.io as a vector knowledge store built on the Nobel Prize's rich public laureate dataset. The sample's Ask AI experience answers plain-language questions with cited sources: ask which women have won the Physics prize, and it responds with Marie Curie and her fellow laureates, drawn directly from the indexed data. It can even reason across the full dataset, fielding questions like which country has produced the most Chemistry laureates. It's the difference between searching a database and speaking with an expert. Expanding ElasticPress beyond WordPress. The Pantheon partnership also points to increasing support for Elasticsearch-based search integrations and projects outside of WordPress. Its ElasticPress plugin is purpose-built for WordPress, connecting it to Elasticsearch, indexing a site's content, routing searches through that index, and adding new visitor-facing features that the index makes possible. On the other side is its optimized Elasticsearch infrastructure, operated by its team and tuned for content-rich websites, from secured search endpoints to the pipeline powering AI features. Its infrastructure's capabilities, now available with Pantheon, are not WordPress-specific. Pantheon supports customers on WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js; its infrastructure and experts can deliver custom search integrations for any of them, connecting the data source, structuring the index, generating embeddings, and shaping the search experience around the product's content model. In fact, the Nobel Prize code sample runs entirely outside WordPress, no plugin involved, talking directly to its search infrastructure. Bringing better search to more of the web. Its partnership with Pantheon puts stronger search, and the foundation for AI-powered discovery, within easier reach for every organization building on the platform, across WordPress and beyond. Fueled and Pantheon are hosting a webinar on July 22 at 2 p.m. ET to walk through the partnership and see ElasticPress capabilities in action.

Pantheon.io has launched managed Next.js support, enabling organisations to run WordPress, Drupal and Next.js sites under one platform. The WebOps platform provider aims to eliminate fragmented, multi-vendor technology stacks by unifying content management systems and modern frontends. The service offers unified Git workflows, automated CI/CD, secrets management and integrated caching through a global CDN. Pantheon's Content Publisher allows direct syncing from Google Docs and Microsoft Word to Next.js frontends without developer intervention. The platform uses contract-based pricing to eliminate bandwidth overages and per-invocation charges. Chief executive Sameer Kazi said the launch extends Pantheon's 15-year track record with open-source CMS to the fastest-growing framework on the open web, providing enterprise-scale orchestration and governance for content-driven Next.js sites.