Naver Plans To Launch AI Tab For Smarter Search By 2026

Posted by By Dan Taylor 3 Min Read

Naver has announced a new AI-driven feature called the “AI Tab,” set to launch in early 2026. The company aims to make search more conversational and interactive by integrating multiple services into a single platform.

At a recent press conference at its D2SF headquarters in Seoul, Naver revealed its strategy to reshape how users search and interact with online content. The core of this new experience will be the “Integrated Agent” system, accessible through a new interface separate from Naver’s traditional search page.

The AI Tab will help users complete tasks like booking restaurants, planning trips, and shopping—without leaving the platform. This will be possible through a mix of vertical agents specialized in areas such as finance, maps, shopping, and local places. These agents will work together to deliver a seamless experience inside the AI Tab.

A key part of the new system is the AI Briefing feature, first introduced earlier this year. It curates search results by pulling from services like Naver Shopping, Naver Pay, and Naver Place. Right now, AI Briefings are used in about 3% of all searches. Naver plans to increase that number to 20% by the end of 2025.

The briefings will also be expanded to cover more topics, including short-form videos, healthcare, and finance. Naver says this will allow users to get more context-aware results tailored to their needs.

The AI system is powered by Naver’s large language model, HyperCLOVA X. The company is also open to using other AI models, whether commercial or open-source, to improve performance. Executives pointed out that Naver’s advantage lies in its access to exclusive local data and its strength in summarizing long-form content like videos.

To further boost the content ecosystem, Naver is also working on the “AI Highlights Project.” This program will help creators gain visibility by highlighting original content in AI Briefings. Features like badges, subscriptions, and community sign-ups will be integrated directly into the search results to increase engagement.

With these changes, Naver is looking to set itself apart from global competitors like Google and Bing, both of which have been growing in the Korean market.

The AI Tab is scheduled to go live in the first half of 2026.

Dan Taylor
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Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.
Founder & Editor