Privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo revealed that it has experienced a significant increase in visits to its "No AI" search option after Google announced a new generation of AI search experience at its I/O conference on May 19. Google released a reimagined "smart" search box at this conference, deeply integrating AI into search services, including upgrading AI suggestions to smarter auto-complete, supporting continuous questioning, expanding "personal intelligence" for connecting Gmail and Google Photos, and search agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users.
DuckDuckGo said that after Google announced the above-mentioned AI search adjustments, the number of visits to its No AI search page more than tripled in a short period of time. By May 28, traffic had reached 3x baseline levels and continues to climb, with visits averaging about 84% above normal since May 19. This means that as Google hands over more search interactions to AI, some users are explicitly choosing to move to a search experience that contains few AI results.
Faced with this demand, DuckDuckGo is actively "embracing" the AI-free search scenario and focusing on promoting its latest browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, which can directly set No AI search as the default search entrance. The so-called No AI search means that it does not provide answers generated by AI assistants, has no chat interface, and minimizes the image content generated by AI. On Apple devices, users can set DuckDuckGo as the system default search engine, but currently it is not possible to directly set a specific No AI page as the system-level default entry. It is worth mentioning that DuckDuckGo also has AI tools of its own, but these features will be turned off by default for users who choose the No AI experience.
DuckDuckGo also plans to integrate No AI-related settings into its original browser extensions in the near future, covering mainstream desktop browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera. In the broader search market, in addition to DuckDuckGo, there are other search engine choices that emphasize privacy and minimize AI results, among which the paid search engine Kagi is a representative. Kagi does not explicitly display AI information on the results page by default unless the user actively chooses to use its AI tools.
As a paid service, Kagi charges a monthly subscription: Basic is $5 per month with a cap on the number of searches, or Premium is $10 per month with unlimited searches. Kagi does not rely on advertising for monetization, does not display ads, and does not make money by collecting and selling user data. This business model is in sharp contrast to traditional free, advertising-driven search engines. At a time when Google is betting on AI search and continues to expand the boundaries of personalization and "intelligent assistants," traffic changes in products such as DuckDuckGo and Kagi are, to a certain extent, reflecting some users' real needs for privacy protection, controllability of results, and a "non-AI" search experience.