Web search has changed shape. Alongside the familiar list of links, a set of AI-driven tools now answers questions directly, cites sources and follows up in conversation. Some are standalone products, some are features added to existing engines, and a few are built for developers or companies rather than the general public. This guide covers the main options and what each is designed to do.
General-purpose answer engines
Perplexity is the best known of the independent AI search tools. It returns a written answer with numbered citations to the pages it drew on, which makes it popular with researchers who want to check the sourcing. It offers a free tier and a paid plan with access to more capable models.
The two largest search companies have built similar features into their own products. Microsoft’s Bing integrates Copilot for conversational answers, and Google added AI Mode to Search in 2025, offering a chat-style interface over its index. Both are free and reach far more users than the independents, which is why they matter even if they are rarely described as separate tools.
You.com started as a consumer search alternative with a privacy emphasis and has since shifted much of its focus toward enterprise and developer offerings. Andi is a smaller conversational search engine that answers directly rather than presenting a link list, and it remains free.
Privacy and paid search
Kagi is a subscription search engine with no advertising. Its pitch is that paying users, not advertisers, are the customer, and it includes AI summaries and a question-answering mode as options rather than defaults. Brave Search is an independent index from the maker of the Brave browser, with an AI answer feature and a privacy-focused policy of not profiling users. Both appeal to people who want AI features without surrendering search history to an ad business.
Tools for developers
Phind is aimed at programmers. It answers technical questions, cites documentation and shows code, and it is tuned toward the kind of queries developers would otherwise take to Stack Overflow. Exa, previously called Metaphor, takes a different approach: it uses neural embeddings to find pages that are semantically similar to a description, rather than matching keywords, and it is primarily offered as an API for building AI applications that need high-quality web retrieval.
Search inside the company
Glean addresses a different problem. It indexes an organization’s internal documents, chat, tickets and wikis and lets employees ask questions across all of it with permissions respected. It is sold to businesses rather than individuals and competes with enterprise search features from Microsoft and Google.
Trade-offs
AI answers save time but introduce a new failure mode: a confident summary can misstate what its sources say, and the sources themselves may be weak. The tools that show citations make this easier to check; those that do not require more trust. For most people the practical choice is between adding an answer engine such as Perplexity for research, trying a paid or privacy-oriented engine such as Kagi or Brave for everyday use, and leaving developer and enterprise tools to the audiences they are built for.
