The Best AI Search Engine

Perplexity is our top pick because it’s a search engine first and a chatbot second. Its help center describes it as an AI answer engine that interprets your question, searches the web in real time and condenses what it finds into a short answer with numbered source links, so you can check the claims or read further. That’s the right design for search: you get the speed of an AI summary without having to take the AI’s word for it.

The free plan is generous for everyday lookups. Perplexity’s plan comparison lists “practically unlimited basic searches,” three Pro Searches a day, one Research query a month and basic file uploads, with the model chosen automatically. Pro Search, which researches across more sources and returns more detailed answers, kicks in automatically when your plan includes it.

Perplexity Pro costs $17 a month billed annually on Perplexity’s Pro page at the time of research. Its help center says Pro adds extended Pro Search, access to advanced AI models you can choose between, image and video generation, and higher upload limits. Max, at $167 a month billed annually, is for people who live in its Research and agent tools. Verified students and educators can get Education Pro for $10 a month. For a deeper look at whether the upgrade pays off, see Is Perplexity Pro worth it?

If ChatGPT is already your everyday assistant, its built-in search may be all you need. OpenAI’s help center says web search is available on ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus and Pro, as well as to people who aren’t signed in, on the web and in the desktop and mobile apps. ChatGPT searches automatically when your question would benefit from current information, or you can pick Search from the tools menu.

Answers that use the web can include citations, and a Sources panel lists the cited pages and other relevant links; on desktop, you can hover over a citation to preview it. ChatGPT also handles local questions well: it can use an approximate location based on your IP address, show maps on iOS and Android, and find restaurant reservations through OpenTable, Resy or Yelp on eligible plans.

OpenAI is careful about what it shares with its search partners. The help center says ChatGPT rewrites your question into targeted queries for third-party search providers, and points to Microsoft’s and Shopify’s privacy policies, but it doesn’t share your IP address or account information with them. For a head-to-head comparison, see ChatGPT vs. Perplexity.

Google AI Mode is the easiest AI search engine to try, because it’s already inside Google Search. You can reach it at google.com/ai, from the search bar on google.com or in the Google app. Google’s help page says AI Mode uses “query fan-out”: it breaks your question into subtopics, searches each at the same time and combines the results into one response with links to explore further. You can ask follow-up questions by text or voice, or with images, files and URLs.

A sensible detail: when Google isn’t confident in an answer, its help page says AI Mode may show a set of web links instead of an AI response. AI Mode is offered in many countries and languages, and Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers 18 and older can use Gemini 4 Argon in AI Mode for harder, multi-step questions, with daily limits. Google AI Pro costs $19.99 a month in the US at the time of research.

Brave Search is the pick if you want AI answers without being tracked. Brave says its search results come from its own index, built from scratch rather than relying on other search providers (an optional setting can mix in Google results), and that its AI answers are based solely on web search results, with sources always cited. Ask Brave adds an AI chat on top of the results page, so you can ask follow-up questions.

Its privacy promises are among the strongest we read. Brave’s privacy policy for Search says it doesn’t link queries to a user, device or IP address, and that IP addresses used for bot detection are deleted within seconds. Ask Brave conversations are encrypted with a key kept on your device and erased after 24 hours of inactivity, and Brave says the AI provider behind Ask Brave runs with zero data retention, so prompts aren’t used for model training.

Kagi takes the opposite approach to Google: you pay, so it doesn’t need to make money from your data. Its privacy policy says its business depends on customers paying rather than on selling user data, that it loads no analytics or telemetry, and that it doesn’t track which results you click. It also offers anonymous ways to use the service, including Privacy Pass, pseudonymous email, cryptocurrency payment and access over Tor.

Kagi’s help center lists a Starter plan at $5 a month with 300 searches and up to 300 AI interactions a month, a Professional plan at $10 a month with unlimited searches plus Kagi Assistant (with standard models), Summarize and Translate, and an Ultimate plan at $25 a month that adds premium models in the Assistant. A trial includes 100 searches and 100 AI interactions.