Kagi

What is Kagi?

Kagi is a paid search engine that works entirely ad- and tracking-free. Instead of earning revenue from advertising, Kagi makes money through subscriptions, so the service has no financial interest in showing sponsored or misleading results. The result is a clean search experience with high-quality, relevant outcomes and an AI feature called Fast Answer that displays a direct summary with source references at the top of the page.

How does Kagi work?

Kagi indexes the web via a layered search index that combines its own crawlers with selected external data sources. Each result is re-scored on quality signals that are entirely separate from advertising revenue, so SEO spam and content farms are actively filtered out of the results.

The AI summary (Fast Answer) runs on large language models that synthesize the top results into a concise answer with source references. Personalization happens via a locally stored profile of blocked and boosted domains, without any link to an advertising profile.

Key features

• Ad-free and tracking-free — no sponsored results, no profile building for advertisers.
• Fast Answer — direct AI summary at the top of the search page, based on reliable sources.
• Rank and block domains — permanently rank websites up or down or exclude them entirely from your personal index.
• Lenses — limit search scope to categories such as academic publications or programming documentation.
• Quality filtering — active filtering of commercial noise, SEO spam and content farms.

Price and alternatives

Kagi works with a fixed monthly fee for an unlimited number of searches. The main difference from Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo is the business model: Kagi sells only to users, not to advertisers, which removes the conflicts of interest of free search engines. Compared with privacy-focused alternatives such as Brave Search or DuckDuckGo, Kagi offers a deeper level of personalization and higher result quality, because subscription revenue is reinvested in indexing and AI features.

Who is it for?

Kagi is ideal for knowledge workers, developers, researchers and anyone who searches intensively every day and is frustrated by the declining quality of free search engines. Those willing to pay for relevance and privacy save considerable time, because usable information is found faster and with fewer click-throughs.