Kagi Review and Pricing for Ad-Free, AI-Optional Search

Short Answer

Kagi is a paid search engine, and unlimited searching on it costs $10 a month. We see readers reach for the $5 tier more than any other, and it caps you at 300 searches a month.

It earns that money if you search all day and want to permanently push sites you dislike out of your results. It does not earn it if you run a handful of searches a day. The free engines on our search engines without AI list cover that for nothing.

Kagi also keeps its artificial intelligence (AI) features switched off unless you ask for one. A normal search returns links and nothing generated.

Kagi Pricing Plan by Plan

Kagi publishes four individual tiers, two household tiers and two team tiers, and the cheapest paid one is $5 a month. The figures below are the ones on Kagi's own pricing page, read on 2 September 2026. Kagi has changed its plan structure before, so treat any price you find repeated elsewhere as out of date until you see it there.

Every price above excludes sales tax, which Kagi adds at checkout. Annual billing takes 10% off, so Professional works out at $108 a year instead of $120. Team plans are billed monthly only.

Two smaller numbers matter more than they look. Moving one person in a Duo or Family plan up to Ultimate costs $15 a month, or $162 a year. So a household where one adult wants the flagship models does not have to move everyone up. And Kagi's fair pricing policy credits you a full month whenever you do not use the service. A month spent travelling is not a month you paid for.

One published figure disagrees with itself. The pricing page puts the free trial at 100 searches and 100 Assistant interactions, while Kagi's help FAQ puts the same trial at 100 searches and 50 AI interactions. The search allowance is consistent across both, so plan around 100 searches and treat the AI allowance as the smaller number.

Kagi does not publish a price for Orion Plus on its pricing page. That subscription belongs to the browser Kagi builds separately, not to search. Orion's site offers it as a subscription or a one-time lifetime licence and does not print the amount, so the figure comes up at checkout rather than before it.

Is Kagi Worth Paying For?

Kagi is worth $10 a month if you search more than about ten times a day, and it is a poor buy below that. The arithmetic comes from Kagi's own numbers rather than ours.

The Kagi live stats page showed 75,047 members and 1,083,300 queries in the previous day when we loaded it on 2 September 2026. That is an average of roughly 14 searches per member per day. Averages hide heavy users, so read that as an average and not as a typical day. At 14 a day, the Starter plan's 300 searches run dry around the twenty-first of the month, which is why $5 fits a light searcher and almost nobody else.

Run the comparison against what you already pay. Professional at $108 a year sits below a single chatbot subscription. Ultimate at $25 replaces one outright if you were already paying for flagship models. Against free search, though, you are buying result quality and control, and those are worth different amounts to different people.

So buy Professional if search is your working tool. Skip Kagi entirely if it is not. Starter only makes sense at a genuinely low search count, and most people who think they are light searchers are not.

How Kagi Makes Money

Kagi is funded by subscriptions and sells no advertising. Its own page on why users pay states the trade plainly: "You pay us, we work for YOU", with "no conflicting interests". The same page cites the 1998 Google founding paper. That paper warned that "advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers".

For a reader, the practical result is that no company can buy a higher position in your Kagi results, because there is no position for sale. That is a real difference from every ad-funded engine, and your $10 buys it.

It buys less than it sounds like. Kagi does not crawl the whole web itself, so some ranking decisions arrive inside the third-party results it licenses. Paying Kagi removes the advertising incentive at Kagi. It does not remove whatever ranking choices the upstream providers made before the data reached it.

Where Kagi Results Come From

Kagi blends its own indexes with a dozen or so outside sources on every query. Its search sources documentation names two indexes it runs itself: Teclis for the web and TinyGem for news. On top of those it makes what the page calls "anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide", so mainstream coverage arrives with it. The named partners include Marginalia, Wolfram Alpha, Apple, Wikipedia, Yelp and Tripadvisor.

That mix explains why Kagi rarely misses a page Google finds. Coverage comes from the mainstream providers, so the difference you notice is in the ordering. The small crawlers add the rest. Marginalia's own site says it prioritises "non-commercial content" and runs on "simple technology, no AI". That is why personal and older sites reach Kagi's first page when they never reach Google's.

The dependency cuts both ways. An engine assembled from other companies' APIs depends on their pricing and their willingness to keep selling access. If one of those providers changes terms, the results you pay for change with it, and no subscriber gets a say. That is the structural risk you take on with Kagi, and it applies to every engine that does not crawl the whole web itself.

Ranking and Blocking Sites Yourself

Kagi lets you set a permanent ranking for any domain, and no free engine matches it. Hovering the shield icon beside a result gives five states, documented on Kagi's personalized results page. You can block a site, lower it, leave it normal, raise it, or pin it to the top. The setting sticks. A content farm you block today is gone from every future search.

In the guides we publish here, the complaint that comes back most about search is not privacy and not advertising. The complaint is the same handful of recipe aggregators, scraped Q and A sites and AI-written listicles reappearing on every query. Per-site blocking removes them for good. No other engine we have written about does that.

Lenses do the same job temporarily. A lens narrows a search by location, file type, date range, keyword, and a list of up to ten included and ten excluded sites. Kagi ships prebuilt ones too, including a Forums lens that limits results to discussion sites. When you want community answers instead of publisher pages, that is one click instead of a hunt.

Keeping Kagi's AI Features Off

Kagi runs its AI features on demand, and a normal search returns no generated text. Its AI philosophy page says "AI is opt-in and on-demand", and compares it to JavaScript: search "works perfectly fine when JS is disabled in the browser". The same page says AI "should be used to enhance the search experience, not to create it or replace it".

There is one trigger that catches people out. Ending a query with a question mark fires Quick Answer automatically, so typing "how tall is denali?" produces a generated summary you did not ask for. Kagi documents the fix on its Quick Answer page. Switch off the Auto Quick Answer toggle in the Search AI settings at kagi.com/settings/ai. The question mark then does nothing, and generated answers appear only when you press the q shortcut or open Kagi Assistant yourself.

Kagi Assistant is the separate chatbot side of the subscription, and it is the reason the tiers differ. Starter and Professional include Quick mode with different monthly allowances. Ultimate adds Research mode and flagship models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google Gemini. That saves a second subscription if you were already paying for one. If you want none of it, Professional is the tier to buy and the toggle above is the setting to change.

On data, Kagi's privacy page says requests to AI tools "are not saved or associated with a customer account", beyond short retention for debugging. It also says Kagi uses "privacy-respecting services that do not save the data or use it for training, whenever possible". The team FAQ on the pricing page adds that AI conversations are not stored beyond 24 hours by default for business accounts. Read those as Kagi's account of its suppliers, not a guarantee from the model providers, which is the limit of what anyone reselling someone else's model can offer.

Setting Kagi Up in a Browser

Kagi needs a browser extension on most desktop browsers, because it has to keep you signed in. Kagi's setup documentation covers Orion, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Firefox Focus and Vanadium on GrapheneOS.

Firefox is the simplest. Install the Kagi Search extension, approve the prompt that changes your default engine, and searches from the address bar go to your account. Chrome works the same way through the Chrome Web Store.

Safari is the awkward one, and the reason is Apple rather than Kagi. Safari has no field for a custom search engine, so the Kagi extension redirects an engine Safari does allow. You pick DuckDuckGo or Ecosia in Safari settings, then choose the same engine in the extension's redirect menu, and every search bounces to Kagi. On iPhone and iPad you install Kagi for Safari from the App Store, enable it under Safari extensions, and set permissions for kagi.com and other websites to Allow.

Orion skips all of that. It is Kagi's own browser, built on WebKit, and it runs on macOS, iOS and iPadOS with a Linux build in beta and Windows listed as coming soon. If you are on a Mac and want Kagi as the default with no extension step, that is the shortest route. Our browsers without AI guide covers where Orion sits against the rest.

Who Owns Kagi

Kagi is owned by its founder and a group of about 93 angel investors from its own user base. Vladimir Prelovac founded the company in Palo Alto in 2018. Kagi's company documentation says it ran on roughly $3 million of his own money from 2018 to 2023, then raised about $2.5 million from those investors. In early 2024 it became a Public Benefit Corporation, a company form that lets directors weigh a stated public mission alongside returns. Its advisory board includes Stephen Wolfram and Rory Sutherland.

For a subscriber, the useful part of that structure is the absence of an advertising parent that could change the incentives overnight. The flip side is scale. Kagi listed 75,047 members on its stats page on 2 September 2026. At that size, one pricing decision changes what every subscriber pays, and the plan structure has already been rewritten more than once.

Kagi vs DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is free and Kagi is not, and that single difference decides the comparison for most people. The two engines otherwise sit closer together than their prices suggest.

Choose DuckDuckGo when your objection is generated summaries rather than result quality. Its own no-AI address says it works the same as normal DuckDuckGo. The difference, in its words: "AI-generated images are filtered out of image results by default, and all other AI features have been removed completely". Bookmarking it is free.

Choose Kagi when you have already tried that and the results themselves are the problem. DuckDuckGo's sources page says its traditional links come largely from Bing, so DuckDuckGo gives you a privacy layer over a mainstream index rather than a different ranking. Kagi lets you change that ranking yourself.

We keep the two deeper comparisons on their own pages. Read DuckDuckGo vs Google if you are deciding whether to leave Google at all. Read DuckDuckGo alternatives if you already left and DuckDuckGo is the thing disappointing you.

Who Should Not Pay for Kagi

Anyone who searches a few times a day should not buy this. At five or six queries a day you never reach the ceiling that makes an unlimited plan sensible. You also never block enough domains for the ranking controls to repay the subscription. Use the free engines on our AI-free search engines list instead, or bookmark a broader set from our alternative search engines guide.

Two other groups should skip it. If your only complaint is Google's AI Overviews, you do not need a new search engine. The web filter and extensions in our guide to turning off AI Overviews handle that for free. And if you want Kagi's browser on Windows, wait, because Orion lists Windows as coming soon rather than shipping.

Our Kagi Review Verdict

Kagi is worth $10 a month for heavy searchers, and worth nothing to everyone else. The subscription buys two things that no free engine sells: results with no advertising position for sale, and permanent per-site ranking you control. Both get better the longer you use them, because every site you block or pin stays blocked or pinned. A week of Kagi shows you almost none of that. You are buying the version of Kagi that exists after a few months.

Three things would change that answer. A material price rise on Professional would break the case, because the case rests on $10 and not on Kagi being irreplaceable. A free engine shipping per-site blocking and pinning would remove the one feature Kagi holds alone. And a supplier cutting off the API calls Kagi depends on would hit result quality straight away.

If you want privacy fixes that cost nothing first, start with our guide to protecting your privacy online. Otherwise, act on this Kagi review the cheap way. Take the free trial and run the ten queries that annoy you most through it. Then read the live figures on Kagi's pricing page the day you decide, because the numbers here were true on 2 September 2026 and Kagi has moved them before.