Kagi Search

Kagi Search is a paid, ad-free search engine that lets you pin, boost, downrank, or block any domain and ships with a multi-model AI Assistant in every plan. We rate it 87/100 — if you actually care about search quality and don't mind paying $5–$25/month, Kagi is the biggest upgrade you can make to your daily browsing in 2026.

What is Kagi Search?

Kagi is a member-funded, ad-free search engine founded by Vladimir Prelovac and launched publicly in June 2022. The product is built around a simple economic bet: if you pay for search directly, there is no advertiser to optimize for, no surveillance profile to build, and the company's incentives align with yours. Kagi has grown from a closed beta to 50,000+ paying members as of June 2025 and continues to publish detailed, public year-in-review reports from its headquarters in Palo Alto with an engineering hub in Belgrade.

Behind the search bar, Kagi blends its own web index with results from Google, Marginalia, Mojeek, Brave, and curated "non-commercial" sources. On top of that it layers tools most competitors treat as separate products: Kagi Summarizer, Kagi Translate, Kagi News, Kagi Maps, an image/video search, and the Kagi Assistant with access to Claude, GPT-5, Gemini, and open-weights models — all behind one subscription.

Key Features of Kagi Search

• Personalized rankings: Every domain in a Kagi result set has a boost, lower, pin, or block button. The adjustments are yours, survive across devices, and are exportable. Most users end up with hundreds of blocked SEO-farm domains within a month.
• Lenses: Saved search filters that restrict queries to a set of domains or content types — e.g., a "forums" lens limited to Reddit, Hacker News, and Stack Exchange, or a "PDFs only" lens for academic research. You can build your own in a few clicks.
• Lightweight results page: Kagi's SERP weighs around 150 KB versus roughly 1.5 MB for Google's default results page — a 10× reduction that is obvious on slow connections and older hardware.
• Kagi Assistant with 30+ models: One chat UI switches between Claude 4.x, GPT-5, Gemini 2.5, Llama, Mistral, and Kagi's own inference. The Professional plan includes standard models; Ultimate unlocks flagship frontier models at $25/month.
• Universal Summarizer and Translate: Any URL becomes a summary via kagi.com/summarizer; Translate, which went viral in March 2026 for its "LinkedIn Speak" mode, now runs natively on iOS and Android.
• Orion browser: A Kagi-built WebKit-based browser for macOS and iOS (Linux in alpha, Windows in development) that supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions and ships with zero telemetry by default.
• Small Web and SlopStop: Community-driven initiatives that surface human-authored sites and let members flag AI-generated "slop" pages to improve result quality for everyone. A dedicated mobile "Small Web" app launched on March 17, 2026.

What Users Say About Kagi Search

Sentiment on Hacker News, r/kagi, r/degoogle, and r/privacy is unusually warm for a paid product. The most upvoted HN threads consistently describe Kagi as "what Google used to feel like in 2010" and point to the uprank/downrank controls as a killer feature. Reddit's r/selfhosted crowd has largely moved on from DuckDuckGo to Kagi, citing that the ability to nuke Pinterest, Quora, and AI-generated blog spam is worth the monthly fee alone.

The honest complaints are specific and worth weighing. Price is the first — $10/month for Professional is steep when Google is free, and the Ultimate plan at $25/month (the one with premium AI models) lands higher than a standalone ChatGPT Plus subscription. Several HN commenters note that the index still leans on Google for fallback results, which makes Kagi vulnerable if Google's API terms change. Orion has also had a rocky 1.0; a recurring Reddit gripe is that extension compatibility is uneven and release cadence is slower than Arc or Brave. Support, by contrast, is almost universally praised — it is not unusual to get a same-day reply from Prelovac himself on the Kagi Feedback forum.

Kagi Pricing

Kagi has four individual tiers plus Family and Team plans. Annual billing saves 10%, and the "Fair Pricing" policy carries unused monthly search credits forward automatically.

Plan	Price	Key Limits
Trial	Free	100 searches + 100 standard AI interactions, one-time
Starter	$5/month	300 searches/month + 300 standard AI interactions
Professional	$10/month	Unlimited searches, unlimited Summarizer and Translate, Kagi Assistant with standard models
Ultimate	$25/month	Everything in Professional + Kagi Assistant with flagship Claude, GPT-5, and Gemini models, plus Research mode
Family	$25/month	Up to 6 Professional seats, parental controls
Team	From $19/seat/month	SSO, admin console, centralized billing

PayPal and Bitcoin (via OpenNode) are supported in addition to cards. There is no public referral or affiliate program in 2026 — Kagi explicitly avoids those — but members do get Kagi Specials discounts with privacy partners like Ente, Fastmail, Windscribe, Addy.io, and Notesnook.

Who Should Use Kagi Search?

Best for: knowledge workers, developers, researchers, and journalists who run 50+ searches a day and are tired of fighting SEO spam and AI-generated listicles. Privacy-conscious users who already pay for Fastmail, 1Password, or a VPN will feel right at home. Power users who love configurability — lenses, custom CSS, blocked domains — will get more value out of Kagi in a week than they will out of Google in a year.

Not ideal for: casual searchers who run a handful of queries a day (Starter's 300 searches is plenty, but the $10 Professional tier is the sweet spot and hard to justify at low volume); users who rely heavily on Google-specific features like Maps reviews, Flights, or Shopping; and price-sensitive users in regions where $10/month is a meaningful expense — for those, DuckDuckGo and Brave Search remain solid free options.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Result quality is visibly better than Google on long-tail, technical, and research queries — not a marketing claim, a consensus finding across HN, Reddit, and independent reviews
• Per-domain uprank/downrank/pin/block controls that persist across devices — a feature no major competitor offers
• Built-in Assistant with 30+ models, Summarizer, Translate, and Maps bundled in one subscription
• Explicitly no ads, no tracking, no profile building — verified by their public privacy page and Tor onion service
• Responsive, engaged team with a public feedback forum where the CEO regularly replies

Cons:

• $10/month Professional is a hard sell versus free alternatives — the Starter plan's 300 searches runs out faster than most people expect
• Index partially depends on Google results as a fallback, creating long-term supply risk
• Ultimate plan's $25/month stacks on top of any separate ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription you already have
• Orion browser 1.0 is promising but still trails Arc, Brave, and Zen on extension parity and release speed
• No native Android Kagi app yet — Android users interact through the mobile web, Kagi Translate, and the Small Web app

Alternatives to Kagi Search

DuckDuckGo is the default free, private search engine — weaker result quality than Kagi but zero cost and a solid iOS/Android experience. Brave Search has its own independent index and a free tier, with optional AI summaries; it is the closest spiritual competitor to Kagi on the free side. Perplexity is a different product category — it is an AI answer engine, not a classic 10-blue-links search engine — but heavy Kagi users often run the two side by side. If you want an open-source self-hosted path, SearXNG aggregates other engines' results with no tracking, at the cost of no native ranking intelligence.

Verdict: Is Kagi Search Worth It?

Yes — for the right user. If you search more than a few dozen times a day and the quality of those results affects your work, Kagi's $10/month Professional plan pays for itself in recovered time within the first week. The combination of lenses, per-domain controls, an honest business model, and a built-in multi-model AI Assistant is not available anywhere else at any price. We score Kagi 87/100: docked a few points for the Starter plan's tight search cap, the partial Google dependency, and an Orion browser that still needs a year to reach parity with Arc or Brave. For anyone who has quietly accepted that Google search is worse than it was in 2015, Kagi is the simplest, most effective fix in 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Kagi Search free?

Kagi has a free Trial plan with 100 searches and 100 AI interactions — enough to evaluate the product but not a permanent free tier. Paid plans start at $5/month (Starter, 300 searches) and $10/month (Professional, unlimited searches).

What platforms does Kagi Search support?

Kagi works as a default search engine in every major browser on macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android via the web. Kagi also ships native iOS and macOS apps, the Orion browser (macOS, iOS, Linux alpha, Windows in development), and mobile apps for Kagi Translate and the Small Web.

How does Kagi compare to Google?

Kagi is paid and ad-free, while Google is free and ad-supported. Most users report Kagi's results are more relevant for technical, long-tail, and research queries because users can boost, pin, downrank, or block any domain — a level of personalization Google does not offer.

Is Kagi Search open source?

No. Kagi's core search stack and Kagi Assistant are proprietary. The Orion browser is free but also closed source. Kagi does publish extensive privacy documentation and runs a Tor onion service.

Does Kagi have an affiliate or referral program?

Not as of April 2026. Kagi has consistently avoided affiliate programs on principle. It instead offers "Kagi Specials" — discounts with privacy partners like Ente, Fastmail, Notesnook, Windscribe, and Addy.io — to paying members.

Does Kagi include AI features?

Yes. Every paid plan includes Kagi Assistant, which provides a unified chat interface across 30+ LLMs including Claude, GPT-5, Gemini, Llama, and Mistral. The Ultimate plan ($25/month) unlocks the frontier models.