Hey Susie!
This has come up a lot with clients who are presented with the empty search bar during QA. They find it confusing and feel as though they should be able to click the tabs and something should happen.
However, it’s important to remember that (assuming they integrate fully according to our instructions) users will rarely ever be presented with an empty search bar, once we go live. They will only be brought to the Answers Experience once they’ve already input a query. So basically - the client shouldn’t worry about this once we go live.
With that being said - if that is not enough to make your client feel comfortable, we are able to set “default queries” for vertical tabs. Meaning that if you click the FAQs vertical you can set it to default query “Frequently Asked Questions” amd trigger the corresponding results. Here is a community post on how to set this up! In general, I don’t always recommend default queries because they have analytics implications.
Let me know if this helps, or if for some reason your client isn’t integrating traditionally, in which case you may find this post about pre-populating results helpful. In general, I definitely do not recommend removing or hiding the vertical tabs - those are a fundamental element of the search experience we have designed and I think it would hurt the user experience way more than it would help.