New AI search engines to watch in 2026

Perplexity answers a question in a few paragraphs and puts the sources next to each claim, so you can check them in one click. It is the engine every guide we read ranks, and the one the newer tools compare themselves to.

The free plan, called Standard, gives practically unlimited basic searches, 3 Pro Searches a day and 1 Research query a month: enough to judge it before paying. At the top, Max costs $200 a month or $2,000 a year, and annual billing for Max is only available on perplexity.ai. Teams pay Enterprise Pro from $40 a month or $400 a year per seat; verified students and teachers get Education Pro at $10 a month.

The risk we noted is on the billing side, not the answers. Reviews written in 2026 come back again and again to charges after cancellation and to a support that replies with automated messages. And if you pay Pro on the web and then upgrade to Max from the mobile app, Perplexity creates a new, separate Max subscription on top of the Pro one. Upgrade where you first subscribed. Our Perplexity alternatives page compares it with ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, and our Perplexity training ranking helps a team learn it. To run it inside an automation, use the Perplexity node for n8n.

Kagi is a paid search engine: no ads, no sponsored results, and an AI layer on top (Kagi Assistant, Summarize, Translate). The bet is simple: when the user pays, the results don't need to serve advertisers.

Starter costs $5 a month for 300 searches and up to 300 AI interactions with standard models. Professional, at $10 a month, removes the search cap and adds Kagi Assistant with standard models. Ultimate, at $25, unlocks the premium models in the Assistant. Annual billing takes 10% off. Before paying, the trial is limited to 100 total searches and 100 AI interactions.

The limit we noted is the Starter cap, and how it is counted: loading more results counts as an additional search, while bangs and search suggestions never count. If you scroll to the second page often, 300 searches go faster than you think. Each lens and content type, such as images or news, also counts as a separate search. Paid yearly, Starter comes to $4.50 a month, with 3,600 searches for the whole year instead of 300 a month.

Many "private" search engines rely on Big Tech indexes for their results. Brave Search delivers results from its own index, built from scratch, and adds Ask Brave, which combines AI chat with a familiar results page: a summary, then videos, websites and products, and follow-up questions.

It is free and works in any browser at search.brave.com. Results include paid ads, delivered without profiling you; Brave Search Premium removes them. For developers, the same index is sold as the Brave Search API, with prepaid credits instead of a subscription: the Search plan costs $5 per 1,000 requests and includes $5 of free credits every month; you can call it from a workflow with the Brave Search node for n8n.

The limit we noted: Brave Search Premium, the ad-free version, is only available in the Brave browser, so in Chrome or Safari you keep the ads. If the AI answers get in the way, turn off "Answer with AI" in the search settings. For everyday questions with an AI summary and no tracking, it is the strongest free pick here. See our AI browsers to watch if you are thinking about switching browsers too.

Exa is not something you type into every morning. It is a search API that AI applications and agents call to find pages, read their contents and pull data. It sits in this list because the guides rank it, and because it is where much of "AI search" is heading: models searching for you.

Pricing is usage-based. The free Starter plan gives $10 of credits every month plus a $10 onboarding bonus, with no payment method required. Search starts at $4 per 1,000 requests for up to 10 results, with $1 per 1,000 requests for each additional result above 10, and page contents cost $1 per 1,000 pages per content type. At $4 per 1,000, the monthly $10 covers 2,500 searches.

The limit we noted is on the enterprise side: Zero Data Retention needs an Enterprise plan with a $12,000 annual commitment in API credits. A team that must guarantee that no query is stored budgets that from day one. Startups and schools can apply for grants of up to $1,000 in free credits. To try it without code, connect Exa to Claude, or call it from the Exa integration for Make or the Exa integration for Zapier.

Felo presents itself as a multilingual AI search and creation platform: it is a good fit for students and for anyone who works with sources in several languages. It is built by Felo Inc., a company based in Tokyo. The free Standard plan gives unlimited high-speed search and 3 file analyses a day, with no card; API access is not included.

Usage is counted in credits, where 1 credit equals $0.001. Pro costs $14.99 a month on the monthly plan, or $149.99 a year ($12.50 a month), and both include 15,000 credits a month plus 200 bonus credits a day. Paying yearly saves $29.89. When a Pro subscriber runs out of credits, search keeps working, with up to 300 Pro searches a day at a zero balance, while slides, images and video pause until a refill.

The limit we noted: a credit system is harder to predict than a number of searches, since a deep research run burns more credits than a quick question. Pro credits expire at the end of each billing cycle, and bonus credits you buy last 90 days: watch your balance the first month before choosing the yearly plan.

Komo is a young AI search engine with focus modes, deep research and people search, all metered in one credit currency, so you pay for what you use. Pro unlocks premium models from several labs (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok) in one place.

The free plan gives 25 credits every day with Komo Fast and budget models; you need to sign in to search. Pro costs $17 a month billed annually, with 2,000 monthly credits; Max costs $170 a month billed annually, with 25,000 credits. Annual billing saves 15%. Credit top-ups cost $5 for 500 credits or $20 for 2,500, a cent per credit against 0.8 cent in the larger pack.

The limit we noted: it is a young vendor, so plan for the day it changes its offer. Keep your important research exported rather than only in its history.

You.com started as a consumer AI search engine, and most guides we read still list it that way. Its pricing page now lists API tiers: Web Search, Contents, Answer and Research APIs for teams that build AI products, plus a free web search through its MCP server, with no API key or account, up to 100 queries a day.

The Web Search API costs $5 per 1,000 calls, and the $10 free sign-up credit covers 2,000 searches; verifying your account adds $90 more, and free sign-up credits are valid for 60 days. One request is one billable call whatever it returns: a call that returns 1 result and one that returns 100 cost the same, so ask for more results per call. Contents are billed $1 per 1,000 pages.

The limit we noted is the pivot itself: if you came for a consumer search engine with a monthly plan, the pricing page no longer shows one. For people who search, Perplexity, Kagi or Brave fit better; for developers, it competes with Exa.