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Comment by charlierguo | Hacker News Reader

Have we figured out a way to monetize AI-powered search yet? Presumably a product like this (or Perplexity) will ultimately be free, in which case they'll be forced to offer ads (bringing us back to Google's status quo) or perhaps worse, we'll have "product placement" in our AI-written results.

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This is already happening, most have either announced or are already monetizing their output with ads.

A few (inlcuding Kagi's LLM assisted search) will be monetized through user/customer subscriptions exclusively.

As with search, these two business models will lead to different outcomes for the users.

No, and that is a big problem, search doesn't make money either. People will not actually pay the cost for AI once they have to.

They might pay for it indirectly. For example, Apple just signed a deal with OpenAI and I could imagine a future where users of Apple devices get free access to some AI because Apple and that company made a deal.

Well, maybe, but I think the huge thing missing from this assumption is that Apple are not paying OpenAI anything, and are developing their own in-house and on-device models.

And a lot of what those on-model devices can do are what the average person will want.

And there's going to take a lot to move people meaningfully away from google.

> No, and that is a big problem, search doesn't make money either.

Kahm, Kagi (and Google) would both disagree. You can even pick your favorite business model!

There could be 2 plans: ad supported and paid version just like YouTube, Spotify etc.

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