This scrappy search upstart is getting thousands of people to give up Google

Search today sure ain’t what it used to be.

On the one hand, you’ve got the escalating sense that Google’s once-reliable results are stuck in a downward spiral. It’s a perception we’ve been seeing take shape for some time now, even before Google Search started pushing accuracy-challenged AI answers into its search engine and steering people away from first-party sources.

On the other hand, you’ve got AI-powered info engines ranging from ChatGPT and Perplexity to Google’s own Gemini chatbot now browsing the web for you and offering up immediate (if occasionally also inaccurate) answers. For the first time, that’s raising pressing questions about the long-term fate of the conventional search experience—all while Google and other providers struggle to keep junky AI-generated info from clouding their results.

It’s a rare moment when something that’s long felt like an unshakable part of our lives suddenly seems vulnerable, and the way we seek out info online is open to reassessment.

Amid all of that, Kagi—a company with a minuscule fraction of Google’s resources—sees an opportunity to convince people to stop turning to Google for search, quit leaning on inconsistent AI answers for important information, and start seeking out a smarter way to find what they need without all the cascading compromises.

Kagi’s founder insists it isn’t a “Google killer”—and, quite critically, it was never meant to be. But two arenas’ worth of early adopters see it differently, including plenty of Redditors, Hacker News commenters, and even Apple oracle John Gruber, who recently declared Kagi “the best search engine in the world.”

And the more you hear about this utopian vision for what the web could be, the easier it is to understand the enthusiasm.

“Red pill moment”

Vladimir Prelovac started sensing a shift in the online search arena as far back as 2018, long before the name ChatGPT had entered the common vernacular or most people thought Google might be in any way vulnerable to a serious search competitor.

Prelovac had just sold his former company, a WordPress management platform called ManageWP, to GoDaddy and was raring for a fresh challenge. While the exact price of the acquisition was never made public, Prelovac had enough cash in his coffers to bootstrap a new startup, without any outside funding, and he knew exactly what problem he wanted to pursue.

“I had my red pill moment,” Prelovac says, referring to ">the scene in The Matrix when Keanu Reeves’s character takes a red pill, unplugs from the simulation he’s been living in, and sees the world as it actually exists for the first time. “I realized Google is basically insulting my intelligence, and the [Google Search] product wasn’t being built for me. It was pretty eye-opening.”

(Kagi did eventually raise a small round of $670,000 in 2023 and then a second round of $1.9 million in 2024.)

Prelovac says he increasingly saw signs that Google’s actual customers were the businesses paying to advertise on its search result pages—not the people looking to those same pages for information. He grew disillusioned with what he describes as a deteriorating experience and a lack of exceptional alternatives. So he decided to do something about it.

“I thought it was ridiculous that we didn’t have a product that’s actually serving the users, not the advertisers,” he says. “I quickly realized the only way to [fix that] is to create a paid subscription-based service, because that’s the only business model that would align incentives.”

Prelovac set out to prove his theory. Within about a year, he had an early prototype of a new service called Kagi—a Japanese word that rhymes with “froggy” and means key, suggesting the way Prelovac hoped to unlock a friendlier, more user-centric web model.

Now, seven years later, Kagi boasts 38,000 paying subscribers, a figure that continues to grow, with rates running from $5 to $25 per month. (Most people should probably pick the middle-of-the-road $10 “Professional” plan, which allows unlimited searches and access to some of the simpler AI features.) Those figures pale in comparison to the throngs of people who visit Google each day and the billions of dollars Google makes from its search product, of course.

But in Prelovac’s mind, that’s precisely the point—and the key to Kagi’s future.

Unlocking a smarter search journey

The best way to describe Kagi is as a less cluttered, more capable, and more customizable version of what we’re all used to seeing from Google Search—only without the ads, the shopping results, and other assorted distractions.

You also won’t find artificial intelligence “answers” forced in your face above regular web results, though you can get to Kagi’s own version of the chatbot concept if you like. (More on that and how it differs from the typical AI chatbot experience in a moment.)

Primarily, Kagi is about taking you to the first-party web info related to whatever you’re seeking and making that experience as effective, premium-feeling, and pleasant as possible. It really is a refreshing change, too, once you get past the inevitable initial adjustment and the occasional muscle-memory-jarring moment—one that opens your eyes to the type of web experience that almost feels more aspirational than realistic in this day and age. And yet, here it is.

“If the user is paying you as a search product company, then you’re incentivized to make search better and better,” Prelovac reasons. “Otherwise, they walk away with their wallet.”

To that end, in addition to the lack of ads and sponsored elements within its results, Kagi empowers you to do things like block specific websites from your results, increase the weight of sites you like in results, and customize nearly everything about the interface—ranging from which widgets and types of results show up to all sorts of settings around the site’s appearance and behavior.

Kagi continuously works to remind you that it’s your search experience, and you should be in control. It’s a lovely upgrade from the effort-requiring work-arounds we’ve all grown accustomed to pursuing for any manner of meaningful customization or unreliable-AI-answer avoiding in the standard search arena, and it’s something you really resent losing when you go back to Google or any other more conventional search service.

Kagi even allows you to create your own custom “lenses,” which are search filters that show you results only from specific sets of websites, making it easy to limit a search to something like academic sites, forums, or your own personal domains on demand and with virtually no ongoing effort.

And all of that is still just scratching the surface of how Kagi works to reshape search, both inside and out.

A revamped window to the web

Even if you don’t customize a thing or exert much energy thinking about the interface, you’ll notice some significant differences in what Kagi’s like to use compared to the status quo. The service combines its custom web index with search results from “almost every other search engine in the world,” as Prelovac describes it—which, rather ironically, suggests you’re actually seeing at least some Google results within Kagi.

But Kagi puts all of that data through its own special blender before serving it up to you—and, as you’d imagine, it includes assurances that your search data will never be saved or used for any manner of advertising. The aim is to create the perfect mix of high-quality results that actually answer what you’re after without making you want to gouge your eyes out. 

“We push down sites that have a lot of ads and trackers, because that usually correlates with low-quality content, and we push up results that have very little ads or no ads and tracking on them, which usually correlates with high-quality content and somebody writing because it’s their passion,” Prelovac says.

Kagi’s index also brings in an added emphasis on what Prelovac calls the “noncommercial” or “small” web—personal blogs, discussions, and other off-the-beaten-path sites that tend to get buried in results from Google as well as the newer breed of large language model chatbots.

This atypical approach is apparent with practically every search you perform within Kagi. If I search for “best usb-c to 3.5mm adapter,” for instance, Google gives me a screen that’s heavy on ads and other sales-oriented offerings. Kagi, in contrast, focuses on Reddit threads and recommendations from lots of lesser-known sites that would never show up in a standard search setup.

If I enter a more specific, black-and-white question—like “Is the Galaxy S25 worth buying?”—Google gives me a bunch of YouTube videos followed by related queries, a block of news stories, and then a single Reddit thread and some more YouTube videos. Kagi serves up a simple summary of different opinions, with clear citations alongside each point, followed by articles at a variety of sites both big and small that seek to answer the inquiry.

Kagi also offers a one-click “Quick Answer” option to get a summary of all the top results for any inquiry on the spot. Plus, within each individual result, it provides a handy “Summarize page” command that shows you the high points of any page’s contents right there, no extra clicks or browser tabs required.

By and large, though, Kagi really does make its AI elements easy to avoid. The options are available if you want ’em—some tucked away into the service’s $25-per-month “Ultimate” subscription. That plan gives you access to Kagi’s Gemini- and ChatGPT-like Assistant chatbot, which combines large language models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, and other organizations together with Kagi’s own web results. The system keeps all of your data private and lets you see info from any of those sources with Kagi’s custom filtering in place, which Prelovac hopes will lead to more refined results than what you’d get directly from any of the associated chatbots.

“AI is limited by what you feed into it,” Prelovac explains. “It all goes back to incentives.”

The big question, then, is how many people are willing to cough up the cash to enjoy these enhancements.

The search for sustainability

Prelovac says Kagi is already profitable, achieving a level of success never experienced by the higher-profile Neeva, a paid search service launched by former Google executives in 2021 and shut down roughly two years later.

In Prelovac’s view, the key differences between Neeva and his creation are the motivation and the metric for success. Neeva raised $77.5 million in funding, with investments from venture-capital bigwigs like Greylock and Sequoia. So despite amassing a pool of 2 million paying users—a number that dwarfs Kagi’s current base of paying members—it never managed to make enough money to be seen as sustainable.

“It’s funny that for them, it’s a failure—[and] for us, it’s a success,” Prelovac says.

On that note, Prelovac deliberately doesn’t think of his service as attempting to be a “Google killer,” as I alluded to earlier. In his eyes, Kagi and Google don’t share the same customers, so there’s no way they could be competing with each other directly—despite the fact that they serve similar surface-level purposes.

“Google’s customers are the advertisers. Ours are the users,” he says. “The source of money for Google and source of money for us comes from totally different market segments.”

​Kagi is also working to set itself apart by developing its own WebKit-based browser, Orion, which includes a smattering of privacy-minded additions while putting the Kagi search service front and center. It’s available only for macOS and iOS at the moment, which means I wasn’t able to use it, personally, as I’m more of a Windows and Android kind of guy. But Prelovac says it’ll make its way to other platforms eventually.
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​Without Orion in the mix, getting other browsers to rely on Kagi for their native search functions can be a bit of an adventure. Kagi offers an extension that handles the setup for you, and if you’re using Safari, that’s the only choice you’ve got. With Chromium-based browsers and also Firefox, you can instead just make a few reasonably easy adjustments in your browser&#8