Kagi Search
Kagi Search is a premium, subscription-based search engine founded in 2018 with a mission to “liberate” web search from advertising and surveillance. Based in Palo Alto, California, and headed by CEO Vladimir Prelovac, its core philosophy is that users should be the customer, not the product. The name “Kagi” means “key” in Japanese, symbolising its aim to be the key to a better internet.
A pivotal milestone was its transition to a fully independent search engine. While it initially functioned as a metasearch engine aggregating results from others like Google and Brave, by 2024 it had removed mentions of these sources, relying instead on its own proprietary indexer, Teclis, particularly for its ‘small web’ searches focused on blogs and forums. By June 2025, Kagi had grown to over 50,000 paying subscribers and was handling nearly a million searches per day, cementing its position as a leading ethical alternative in the search market.
Features and Functionality
Kagi combines a high-quality search engine with a powerful, integrated AI assistant, offering a suite of features designed for efficiency and user control:
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Ad-Free, Privacy-First Search: The foundation of Kagi. It delivers clean, high-quality results with no advertisements, sponsored links, or user tracking. Searches are not logged, and the service uses minimal cookies, with a clear privacy policy.
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Advanced Result Customisation (Up/Downranking): Users have unprecedented control over their results. You can permanently boost (uprank) domains you trust and ban (downrank) or block those you find unhelpful or low-quality, creating a personalised search experience that improves with use.
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Lenses: This feature allows users to focus searches on specific types of content instantly. Pre-built Lenses include ‘Forums’ (Reddit, communities), ‘Academic’, and ‘Programming’. Users can also create their own custom Lenses to filter results to a specific set of websites, effectively creating a bespoke search engine for specialised tasks.
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Kagi Assistant: An integrated AI chatbot that provides access to over 30 different large language models (LLMs) from leading providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and DeepSeek. It can be toggled to use Kagi Search for web-grounding, ensuring answers are informed by the live web and include source citations.
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Universal Summarizer: A tool that can generate concise summaries of any webpage with a right-click (in the Orion browser) or within search results. Users can choose between ‘Key Moments’ (bullet points) or a paragraph ‘Summary’, and can even output the summary in a language different from the source material.
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Bangs: Borrowed from DuckDuckGo, this feature allows for quick redirects to other sites’ search functions. Prefixing a query with
!gsends it to Google,!ytto YouTube, and!aidirectly to the Kagi Assistant, acting as a handy escape hatch if needed. -
Orion Browser: Kagi’s own WebKit-based browser for macOS and iOS (with Windows and Linux in development). It is designed for speed and privacy, supports Chrome and Firefox extensions, and features deep integration with Kagi’s summarisation and search tools.
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Additional Tools: The ecosystem includes Kagi Translate (supporting 244 languages) and Small Web, a curated space for discovering hidden gems on the internet beyond algorithmic recommendations.
Pros & Cons Table
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| 🔒 Unmatched Privacy & Control: No tracking, no ads, and the ability to customise results by up/downranking domains gives the user ultimate control. | 💸 Subscription Cost: Requires a paid subscription after 100 free searches, which can be a significant barrier compared to free alternatives. |
| 🎯 High-Quality, Relevant Results: Widely praised for surfacing useful information from human-centric discussion sites and blogs, effectively filtering out SEO spam and low-quality content. | 🌐 Niche Market Share: Its smaller index might occasionally lack the comprehensiveness of Google for very fresh or hyper-local queries (e.g., specific local business info). |
| 🤖 Powerful Integrated AI: Access to a vast array of top LLMs in one place, grounded by Kagi’s own search results for more accurate, cited answers. | 📊 Metered Lower Tiers: The Starter plan ($5 for 300 searches/month) can feel restrictive for power users, creating mental overhead about when to use it. |
| ⚙️ Deep Customisation: Features like Lenses and custom CSS theming allow users to tailor the entire search experience to their specific workflows and preferences. | 🔍 Learning Curve: The sheer number of features (Lenses, custom rankings, Assistant models) requires an initial investment of time to learn and configure for optimal use. |
| ✨ Unique Innovative Tools: The Universal Summariser and ‘Pinch to Summarize’ in Orion are genuinely unique tools that save time and enhance productivity. | ➗ Value Proposition: The cost may be harder to justify for casual users who do not feel the pain of degraded results on mainstream, ad-supported engines. |
Overall Rating
4.8 / 5 ★★★★☆
Kagi Search & Assistant is an exceptional, visionary product that delivers on its promise of a cleaner, more private, and user-centric web experience. It excels in result quality, customisation, and its innovative integration of multi-model AI. It is held back only by its subscription cost, which may deter some, and the inherent comprehensiveness limitations of a smaller search index. It is a near-perfect choice for professionals, researchers, and anyone frustrated with the state of ad-supported search.
Key Reviews
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The Verge (David Pierce): Hailed it as “The best Google alternative I’ve tried yet,” praising its focus on quality results and user control.
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404 Media (Jason Koebler): Stated, “Kagi is simply better than Google and is worth paying for,” emphasising the value of its ad-free, aligned incentives.
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User Experience (3-Month Review): A long-term user reported that Kagi “passes the vibe check”, noting superior results for programming queries and recipes from diverse blogs, though it sometimes falls into the same SEO pitfalls as Google for commercial product searches. The reviewer strongly advised against the restrictive $5 Starter plan, recommending the Unlimited ($10) tier for a seamless experience.
Summary: Key Points
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🏆 Core Strength: A truly user-aligned search experience. Its ad-free, privacy-first model combined with deep customisation tools like up/downranking makes it uniquely powerful.
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🚀 Key Differentiator: The integration of a multi-model AI Assistant grounded by its own high-quality search results, providing cited, accurate answers from the best available LLMs.
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🎯 Ideal For:
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Professionals and power users who rely on search for work and are frustrated by the declining quality of ad-supported engines.
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Privacy-conscious individuals who want to escape the surveillance-based business model of big tech.
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Researchers and learners who benefit from tools like Lenses and the Universal Summariser to focus on quality information.
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⚠️ Important Considerations:
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Start with the 100 free searches to thoroughly test its effectiveness for your specific needs before subscribing.
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Skip the $5 Starter plan; the $10 Unlimited plan is significantly better value and removes the anxiety of counting searches.
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Embrace the customisation: Invest time in setting up downranks for poor-quality sites and creating lenses to get the most out of the platform.
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💰 Pricing:
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Free Trial: 100 lifetime searches.
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Starter: $5/month (300 searches).
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Professional: $10/month (unlimited searches, standard AI models).
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Ultimate: $25/month (unlimited searches + access to all premium AI models like Claude Opus and GPT-4.1).
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🛠️ Alternatives: DuckDuckGo is a free, privacy-focused alternative but lacks the result quality and customisation. Google and Bing are the comprehensive, free giants but come with ads, tracking, and less relevant results. Perplexity AI is a strong competitor in the AI-powered answer space but lacks Kagi’s level of user control over traditional search.