You turned on Wix's Site Search, typed in a word you know is on your site, and got nothing back. Before you assume the feature is broken, it helps to know what it actually covers. Most of the time the cause is a setting you can fix in a few minutes. Occasionally it's a limitation in Wix itself that no setting will solve, and the sections below help you tell which one you're dealing with.
How Wix Site Search actually works
Once you add Site Search to your site, Wix scans your content and builds an index, which is the list it checks a query against. Visitors see suggestions as they type, matched against that index.
According to Wix's own support documentation, Site Search covers static pages, blog posts, pages hidden from your site menu, dynamic pages built on Wix's CMS (also called Content Manager), Wix Stores products, Bookings pages, Events, and the Wix Forum. It explicitly does not cover content inside embedded iframes or HTML widgets, dataset content set to "fetch after load," private member pages, and pages you've hidden from search engines. If the page Wix generates for each item in a collection is marked as hidden from search engines, it also drops out of Site Search.
An additional complication: Wix's documentation lists dynamic pages and CMS content as searchable, but on Wix's own community forum, multiple site owners have reported dynamic pages and database items dropping out of search results with no fix offered beyond "contact support." Those threads go back years and none of them show an official resolution. So if you've checked everything below and a specific collection still won't show up, you've likely hit that known gap and there isn't a setting you can change to fix it.
Free fixes to try first
Check the "Show on Search" toggles. In Site Search's settings, each content type (pages, blog posts, products, events) has its own on/off toggle. If a toggle is off, nothing of that type shows up, no matter how well it's indexed.
Turn on "Show hidden pages (SEO)" if you want hidden pages searchable. This is a separate toggle from the per-type ones above, and it only affects pages you've deliberately hidden from search engines elsewhere.
Open your dynamic page's SEO settings and confirm indexing is allowed. For a CMS collection, go to your SEO dashboard, find the page type under dynamic pages, and check the "allow search engines to index this page" setting under its Basics tab. If that's off, the page is also excluded from Site Search.
Republish the site. Content only gets indexed once it's live, so a saved-but-unpublished change won't show up in search no matter what else you do.
Give it time, then recheck. Wix doesn't publish a specific reindexing window for Site Search. If content still isn't appearing a day or two after republishing and every toggle above checks out, you've probably hit the dynamic-page gap mentioned earlier.
When an app is worth it
If you've worked through that list and a collection still won't surface, or you want things Site Search doesn't offer at all (like typo tolerance, synonyms for the terms your visitors actually type, or a report of searches that came up empty), then a dedicated search app is the way to go. The Wix App Market's Design Elements category has several built specifically for this.
Where SweepIndex fits in
SweepIndex is a freemium Wix app that adds its own search box to your site, backed by its own index. Wix's search depends on how your pages are set up, so a CMS item only shows up if its dynamic page exists and is visible to search engines. SweepIndex reads your published content directly instead, so a collection doesn't need dynamic pages to be searchable. It indexes the full text of every blog post, the titles and addresses of your regular pages, for each CMS collection you add, the fields you pick, and your store products if you turn them on. That means a recipe collection's ingredients can be searchable while an internal notes field stays out.
Searches are typo tolerant, so "chiken" still finds "chicken," and you can add synonyms so that a visitor who types "couch" finds your "sofa" page. SweepIndex keeps a log of every search on your site. The dashboard shows how many searches ran and highlights the ones that found nothing, starting with the most common. For each of those you decide what the visitor was looking for and add a synonym or a redirect to the right page, and the next person who types it gets a result.
When you publish a change, Wix notifies SweepIndex and it updates that item right away, so results stay current without waiting for a scheduled recrawl.
The Free plan indexes up to 1,000 items with every feature included. An item is one post, page, collection entry, or product. For an unlimited index, the Site plan is $9 a month. SweepIndex asks for read-only access, so it can read your content but never change it.
If you run a Wix store, SweepIndex can search your products too. Turn on Store products in the dashboard and visitors can find items by name, description, or SKU, with the price shown in the results. Hidden products stay out.
If the gaps above are the ones you've been running into, you can see SweepIndex in the Wix App Market: https://www.wix.com/app-market/venture-vd-llc-sweepindex.