Kagi is a subscription search engine with no ads and no click tracking, letting you raise or block individual domains, priced from $5 a month for 300 searches up to unlimited plans with an AI assistant built on multiple frontier models.
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Kagi is a search engine you pay for. That single fact explains almost everything else about it, because the decision to charge a subscription is not a pricing detail — it is the product's entire argument. The company states the case directly: free services make money by selling your attention, and Because Kagi is funded by user subscriptions, we answer to you, with the incentive to prioritise what users need rather than to engineer clicks on ads.
The positioning that follows from that is summed up on the homepage as reclaiming the web and restoring your privacy: Search without ads, block invasive trackers, and enjoy a noise-free internet on your own terms. In practice this means results with no advertising, no tracking of which link you click, and a set of controls that let you shape your own results rather than accept whatever an algorithm optimised for engagement decides to show you.
An independent test by a Nieman Journalism Lab reporter in April 2025 described the engine as reliable and unobtrusive, and noted that it draws results from a combination of trusted sources and its own index — an outside observation that matches what the company itself discloses about sourcing.
It is a real business with real, publicly visible scale — and the numbers are worth stating precisely, because they are smaller than the marketing language might suggest. The company publishes a live statistics page showing 74,553 members, 9,775 families and 396 teams, along with roughly 1,036,000 queries in the past day and 20,997 Assistant threads. Those are the actual figures at the time of writing, published by the company itself. For comparison, the site's own framing notes that its membership exceeds the population of 32 countries and territories. This is a substantial niche product, not a mass-market search engine.
One thing to get straight immediately, because the official website invites the confusion: Kagi Inc. runs several products side by side, and this page is about the search engine. The company also operates Orion Browser, Kagi Translate, Kagi News, Kagi Summarize and Small Web. These are separate products with separate audiences and, in the case of Orion, a separate app with its own — noticeably different — user ratings. Claims you may see attributed to "Kagi" about built-in ad-blocking or support for 240+ languages belong to the browser and the translation product respectively, not to the search engine. This page keeps them apart.
The other thing worth establishing early is how seriously this product is taken by the people most likely to evaluate it critically. Unlike most tools in this category, Kagi generates sustained, high-volume discussion on Hacker News — its pricing changes, its product decisions and its critics have all drawn threads running to hundreds of comments, with the largest exceeding 1,700 points and 900 comments. That is unusual, and it means the evidence base for judging this product is unusually good. It also means the criticism is unusually well documented, which the limitations section below draws on directly.
Ad-free results with no click tracking. The foundation. There is no advertising in results, and the privacy policy states plainly that unlike most search engines, we do not track which search result you choose to click. The absence of both is what the subscription buys.
Personal ranking controls. You can raise or block individual domains in your own results, permanently. If a content farm keeps appearing in your searches, you can remove it from your own web for good; if you trust a particular source, you can push it up. The company publishes an aggregated leaderboard of which domains its users promote and block most — itself a piece of transparency rare in this category, and a page that has drawn hundreds of comments on Hacker News in its own right.
Kagi Assistant. An AI assistant tied to the subscription tiers rather than sold separately. The top tier provides Research mode and flagship models including Claude, GPT, Gemini and other providers, while lower tiers get a faster, more limited mode. Usage is meaningful rather than decorative: the company's own statistics page records around 21,000 Assistant threads in a single day.
Result quality controls that keep evolving. The product ships changes at a steady clip. As recently as August 2026 it added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results — a small feature, but one that directly addresses a common frustration and illustrates how the paid model lets user requests drive the roadmap rather than advertiser interests.
A deliberately finite result set. Kagi does not do infinite scroll. This is a design position rather than a limitation of the index, and it is discussed in more detail below.
Anonymity options that go beyond the usual. Beyond the standard privacy claims, the service supports pseudonymous accounts, cryptocurrency payment, Tor access, and Privacy Pass authentication, the last of which the company says provides provable anonymity guarantees by decoupling authentication from identity.
Replacing Google as a daily default. The primary use, and the one the product is designed around. The realistic question is not whether it works but whether the results justify a recurring cost.
Research where source quality matters. If you repeatedly need to filter out SEO-optimised content farms, the ability to permanently downrank specific domains compounds in value over time in a way that no one-off search trick does.
Escaping AI-generated filler. For users specifically frustrated by low-quality generated content dominating results, the domain controls and the company's ongoing work in this area are the core draw.
Privacy-conscious searching without giving up quality. For people who found privacy-focused alternatives adequate on privacy but weaker on results, this occupies a different point on that trade-off — paying for it is what makes the difference possible.
Teams and households wanting consistent search. Family and Team plans exist and are actively used, with nearly ten thousand families and several hundred teams on the books.
AI-assisted research alongside search. For users who want an assistant grounded in search results rather than a standalone chatbot, the Assistant tiers bundle both into one subscription.
It suits heavy searchers whose work depends on result quality — researchers, developers, journalists, analysts — where the time saved on a single bad search session can justify a month's subscription.
It suits people actively frustrated by ads and SEO spam, who have reached the point of being willing to pay to make the problem stop rather than continuing to complain about it.
It suits the privacy-conscious who also want good results, and who are willing to accept that paying with money instead of attention is the mechanism that makes this possible.
It suits households and teams who can spread the cost across several people.
It is a poor fit for casual searchers — if you search a handful of times a day for straightforward things, free engines will serve you adequately and the subscription will feel like a solution to a problem you do not have.
It is a poor fit for anyone unwilling to change defaults, since the value only materialises when it becomes your everyday engine.
It is a poor fit for users who need absolute certainty about result provenance, given the third-party sourcing described below.
Kagi is primarily a web service, usable in any browser by visiting the site or by setting it as your default search engine.
On mobile and in Safari specifically, the search functionality is delivered as a browser extension rather than a conventional app. The App Store listing for the search product is Kagi for Safari, which holds 3.70 across 182 ratings. Setup involves installing extensions on my phone and laptop, in the words of one reviewer who documented the process.
It is important to keep the sibling products distinct here, because their store presence differs sharply: Orion is a separate product from the search engine, listed independently with a 4.04 rating across 1,175 ratings, and Kagi Assistant and Small Web are separate listings again with far smaller samples. When someone cites a Kagi app rating, it matters a great deal which app they mean.
For anonymity, the service supports pseudonymous accounts, cryptocurrency payment, Tor access, and Privacy Pass authentication, which is a broader set of options than most commercial services offer. On the retention side the policy is specific rather than vague: Load balancer and virtual machine logs for 7 days, error traces for 90.
Pricing is fully public and specific, which is worth noting because many tools in this category hide it behind a signup.
Trial is free and includes 100 searches. Starter is $5 a month for 300 searches, with the Assistant in its quick mode. Professional is $10 a month for unlimited searches with a larger Assistant allowance. Ultimate is $25 a month, adding Research mode and frontier models from multiple providers.
Family and Team plans are also offered, and the usage statistics confirm they are genuinely adopted rather than nominal, with 9,775 families and 396 teams active.
The billing detail most worth knowing is unusually generous: in months where you do not use your plan, we will automatically apply a full credit to your account for that month. Subscription products rarely refund inactivity voluntarily, and it is consistent with the company's stated argument that its incentives point at users rather than at extraction.
For context on why search costs money at all, the company has disclosed that Google's grounding service runs at $35 per 1,000 requests, which it describes as economically unviable for search at scale. Whatever else one concludes, the underlying data costs are real.
Four tiers: a free trial with 100 searches, Starter at $5 a month for 300 searches, Professional at $10 a month for unlimited searches, and Ultimate at $25 a month adding Research mode and frontier AI models. Family and Team plans are also available.
There is a free trial of 100 searches, but no permanently free tier. This is deliberate — the subscription is the mechanism that removes advertising, so a free tier would undermine the model.
Partly. It maintains its own index but also licenses results from Mojeek, Brave, Yandex, Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Apple and Wolfram Alpha, and uses third-party SERP API providers where direct licensing is unavailable. The company has not disclosed what share of results comes from its own index.
The privacy policy states it does not track which result you click, keeps request logs only temporarily and in a manner that they are not linked to an account, and retains load balancer and virtual machine logs for 7 days and error traces for 90. Payment information is not used to link users to their Kagi activities.
To an unusual degree, yes. The service supports pseudonymous accounts, cryptocurrency payment, Tor access and Privacy Pass authentication, which the company says provides provable anonymity guarantees.
That depends entirely on your search volume and how much bad results cost you. Heavy searchers in research-driven work tend to find the arithmetic easy; casual searchers generally do not. Use the 100 trial searches on real work rather than tests before deciding.
The company applies a credit automatically: in months where you do not use your plan, we will automatically apply a full credit to your account for that month.
They are different products from the same company. Orion is a web browser; Kagi is a search engine. Orion's ad-blocking and anti-tracking are browser features and should not be attributed to the search product, and their app ratings differ substantially.
Yes, though setup is more involved than with a free engine. On iOS the search function is delivered as a Safari extension, and making Kagi your default requires installing extensions on each device you use.
Treat them as starting points. A widely-discussed critique documented cases of the AI features returning confidently incorrect information, and the homepage's absolute claim about not training on user data is softened in the privacy policy to a conditional. Verify anything that matters against the underlying sources.
