Naver Launches AI Tab Beta for Plus Members in Search Push

Naver announced on April 28 that it has launched a beta version of its artificial intelligence search service, AI Tab, exclusively for Naver Plus membership users. The conversational search tool represents the company's most significant defensive move yet against Google's AI-powered push into South Korea, one of the few major markets where the American search giant has never overtaken the local incumbent.

AI Tab functions differently from Naver's existing AI Briefing feature. While AI Briefing summarizes results at the top of the page, AI Tab creates a dedicated conversational space within the search interface. Users can access it from the main Naver PC search bar, positioned below AI Briefing, and in integrated search results for Shopping and Place. The service understands search intent and context, then expands the scope of exploration through dialogue (a problem that has plagued users for years, frankly).

The system's core advantage lies in its connectivity across Naver's vertical services. It combines domain-specific data accumulated in the Naver ecosystem with user-generated content to support everything from exploration to execution on a single screen. For example, if a user asks for a cafe near Hwadam Forest suitable for a date with a pretty view, AI Tab comprehensively analyzes Naver Place information, visitor reviews, and blog posts. Users can check details and proceed with a reservation directly in the right-hand area of the PC screen.

Similarly, for product queries like recommending a four-door refrigerator that many newlywed couples buy, the tool provides a product selection guide and recommended items. Users can check details and proceed to purchase immediately without navigating through countless reviews one by one. This represents a shift from summary to action that Naver's CEO Soo-yeon Choi described as a turning point in the company's search paradigm.

According to reporting from Digital Today, Naver plans to expand AI Tab's availability to all users and to the main mobile search bar in the first half of 2026. At the time of official launch, the company intends to optimize response speed and continue improving performance for consecutive queries with complex conditions.

Within this year, Naver plans to link Smart Lens to strengthen the multimodal AI search experience and upgrade the service to proactively suggest additional queries. The company also said it will invest more than 100 billion won ($67.4 million) through 2028 to build what the industry calls AI-ready data, training content that is prestructured for machine consumption.

Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, Naver is not crawling the open web. Instead, it is co-producing exclusive material with partners including public broadcaster EBS and encyclopedia publisher Doosan. This arrangement sidesteps copyright disputes that have dogged other AI firms and locks up Korean-language content competitors cannot access.

That data enclosure forms the core of Naver's competitive logic. Its blog, cafe, Place, and commerce platforms, which external AI crawlers are blocked from, hold two decades of Korean user-generated content on restaurants, local businesses, product reviews, and travel. AI Tab is designed to route queries to vertical agents that execute transactions, booking a clinic or ordering a product, rather than simply summarizing answers.

Early traction from Naver's year-old AI Briefing feature lends some weight to the bet. The tool now appears on 20 percent of search results, reaching more than 30 million monthly users, the company disclosed this month. Independent reporting from Korea Herald notes that Naver held 63.83 percent of the Korean search market in March against Google's 28.67 percent, per Internet Trend.

However, Google has gained nearly 10 percentage points over the past decade. Opensurvey data released in January showed Gemini's three-month usage rate in Korea tripling to 28.9 percent between March and December 2025, the fastest shift the local market has recorded. Whether Naver's exclusive data strategy is enough to maintain its lead remains the real question.

The physical experience of using AI Tab involves clicking through the search bar, waiting for the conversational interface to load, then typing or speaking queries that trigger the system's vertical service connections. The right-hand panel appears with actionable options, but response times for complex multi-condition queries may vary during the beta phase. Users will need to test whether the promised execution capabilities actually work smoothly in practice.

Whether users actually pay for Naver Plus membership just to access this feature remains the real question. The beta launch is a start, but market dynamics in Korea have proven volatile. Time will tell if AI Tab can truly transform search behavior or if it's another feature that gets buried in the interface.

Artūras Malašauskas is an AI Systems Integrator with 20+ years of production-grade web engineering experience. He has designed, shipped, and scaled enterprise Python/PHP systems for logistics, SaaS, and public-sector clients. For the past year, he has focused exclusively on AI integrations: deploying open-source LLMs, building generative media pipelines (image, audio, video), and engineering multi-agent workflows for real production environments. His standard: reproducibility, security, cost-efficient inference—no vaporware. He documents and evaluates emerging AI tooling, separating verified capabilities from marketing noise. Technical editor at: muza-ai.eu, ai-verslas.lt, ai-naujinos.lt Connect on LinkedIn