What is an AI Search Engine?
An "AI search engine" is a type of new search engine that started appearing in the last few years that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the way we search on the Internet. Now, it is not just search results but also a summary and a feeling like you have someone who is doing web search for you and presenting it to you in a conversational way where you can easily follow up and where you can save time avoiding dummy and non-useful websites.
A typical set of features in an AI search engine includes:
- Conversational search: You can choose a follow-up or even enter your own custom follow-up question to quickly refine search results and explore related topics. Because of better text understanding, you can also ask questions on specific subjects without knowing a specific language.
- Entity recognition: AI search engines can easily identify specific entities, such as people, places, and organizations, so you can do complex research faster and easier.
- Multimodal search: AI search engines can process and combine search results from various types like websites, videos, images, and summarize them so you don't need to read them separately.
- Explainability: AI search engines provide information on how they arrived at their search results, enhancing transparency and trust.
Like Google replaced Yahoo and Altavista in the 2000s, AI search engines may replace Google or at least provide us with a way to more easily do web searches and access complex information faster.
For the list of top AI search engines, please check Top AI Search Engines for 2025.