I figured it out (that’s what happens when you post after investigating something for 6 hours — you figure it out yourself).
My clue was Mike’s helpful post at http://www.relevanssi.com/knowledge-base/query_posts/, directing me to look at my theme’s search.php file.
My problem was different from the post, though: my theme assumed I’d be using WordPress’s search, which indexes only posts, not pages. So the theme only showed results for posts and portfolio posts. I added this to get mine working (and since I want to direct people to pages before posts, I put it higher up in the document):
<h2>Pages</h2>
<dl>
<?php
// return only our post items
$i = 0;
while( have_posts() ) : the_post();
if( $post->post_type == ‘page’ ) {
$i++;
printf(‘<dt>%2$s</dt><dd>%3$s</dd>’, get_permalink(), get_the_title(), get_the_excerpt());
}
endwhile;
if( $i == 0 ) { printf(‘<p>%s</p>’, __(‘None’, ‘pixellin’)); }
?>
</dl>
