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Kagi

Ad-free, tracker-free paid search with deep personal controls — plus Assistant, Orion browser and a whole privacy-first web ecosystem

Website:https://kagi.com/
Pricing:Paid — 100 free trial searches, then from $5/month (Starter), $10 (Professional), $25 (Ultimate)
License:Proprietary
Platform:Web, Orion browser, browser extensions, API
Hosting:Hosted service
Account:Required
Source:Not available (proprietary)
Added:2026-10-14
Last verified:October 2026
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Website: https://kagi.com/ · Type: Independent, user-funded company (Kagi Inc.) — no ad business model by design

Why it exists

Ad-funded search optimizes for clicks, not answers: SEO spam, sponsored carousels and tracking pixels are the natural output. Kagi's bet is that search is worth paying for like electricity — users, not advertisers, are the customer. The result is probably the most-loved search experience of the last decade: ad-free, tracker-free, and personal in ways the giants won't allow — promote or demote any domain by ± Slider weight, block sites forever, or search only within the "Small Web" of non-commercial, human-made pages.

Main features

  • Kagi Search — clean results with personal ranking controls (lenses, domain weights, block/remove), region and time filters, and an API for programmatic search.
  • Kagi Assistant — multi-model AI chat grounded in search results; Quick mode on lower tiers, Research mode with flagship models (Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek…) on Ultimate — with prompts kept private.
  • Orion Browser — the only browser that runs Safari, Chrome and Firefox extensions, with zero-surveillance built-ins and native ad-blocking.
  • Kagi Translate — 240+ languages for text, pages and chats without handing translation traffic to an ad company.
  • Kagi News — private topic briefs stripped of clickbait; Kagi Summarize — on-demand article summaries in your language.
  • Small Web — a curated, browsable directory of non-commercial sites; a daily-visit antidote to the SEO-fed web.
  • Libraries & API — pay-per-use search API for building tools on top of clean results.

Who it's for

  • Anyone whose search results have slowly rotted into ads and AI sludge — Kagi is the cure you've been assuming doesn't exist.
  • Researchers, developers and writers with 20+ searches a day for whom $10/month is trivially cheaper than the time it saves.
  • Privacy-first households (family plans) and anyone orchestrating an exit from the attention economy.
  • Developers needing an honest search API without scraping.

How it compares

  • Google/Bing — free, "fully loaded" with ads and tracking; Kagi inverts the incentive and it shows within the first ten queries.
  • DuckDuckGo / Startpage / Brave Search — free privacy options; good defaults but no personal ranking control and still ad-supported adjacency; Kagi is subscribed-search done properly.
  • Perplexity — answer-engine with similar Assistant energy, but data-hungry and ad-scheme-prone; Kagi Assistant keeps the search grounding without the surveillance.
  • Self-hosted metasearch (SearXNG) — free and private, but you inherit the index quality problem Kagi actually solves.

Notes

  • The free tier is a trial (100 searches with an account) — the point is to make the model sustainable, not to funnel you to ads.
  • Search quality is genuinely customizable: import the famous blocklists (e.g. Pinterest removal) with one click.
  • Individual plans carry fair-use query limits; heavy users should look at Professional (unlimited) rather than stacking accounts.
  • The ecosystem grew fast — Assistant, Orion, Translate, News, Summarize — but the core Search remains the product; everything else works without it and vice versa.