Naver reported its third-quarter numbers on 12 November, and for search marketers the headline isn’t the record ₩3.47 trillion in revenue. It’s what CEO Choi Soo-yeon said on the earnings call about how Naver plans to charge for ads once AI agents sit between the searcher and the click.
The short version: Naver says keywords and clicks are becoming a poor measure of an ad’s value, and it is preparing to bill some advertisers on completed transactions instead, with a pilot in the first half of 2027.
The numbers
According to Yonhap and Naver’s own 3Q26 earnings deck:
- Revenue was ₩3,472.4bn, up 10.7% year on year and a quarterly record.
- Operating profit fell 20.9% to ₩451.3bn, with the margin down from 18.2% to 13.0%. Naver blames investment in AI infrastructure, content and offline data.
- Naver Platform advertising, which is mostly search ads, came in at ₩1,474.8bn, up 5.5% year on year and 1.9% on the quarter.
- Platform services revenue (commerce and membership) grew faster, up 13.1%.
Ad growth of 5.5% at a time when AI answers are supposedly eating search won’t impress anyone, but it isn’t a collapse either. Naver’s deck sums up the quarter’s ad story in one line: AI Tab return visits and transaction conversion are improving, and an “execution-type AI agent” is on the way.
The AI ad model and what it did to Powerlink
Digital Daily reports that Naver rolled out an AI prediction model, trained on large-scale user behaviour data, across Shopping Search ads, Home Feed and Powerlink during the quarter. Choi said Powerlink click-through rate rose 11% and conversions rose 9% as a result, and more ad placements will get the model in 2027.
Then the bigger change. Naver has already moved ADVoost Shopping fully onto value-based automated bidding. Next year it will overhaul Powerlink so that the budgets of roughly 500,000 advertisers are spread across placements on and off Naver according to performance (Newsis via Financial News). Beyond shopping and Place, it is building transaction-linked ads for finance, insurance and cars, where the purchase happens with a partner after comparison and consultation. “We are preparing a model that extends the billing standard from clicks to actual transaction results,” Choi said, with a pilot due in H1 2027.
AI Tab and the agent app
On the user side, Choi said AI Tab traffic flowing on to shopping and local services has nearly doubled since launch, and that return-visit and multi-turn rates rise every month (Digital Daily). That fits the 23.7% “action query” figure in Naver’s own AI Tab service brief earlier this month. Naver also confirmed a separate personal AI agent app before the end of 2026, one that does things for the user rather than just finding them (Money Today).
Meanwhile, the Powerlink redesign we covered when it was still a test went fully live on the afternoon of 12 November: favicons grew from 24px to 32px, and site name and URL now sit on two separate lines (Today Marketing). If you never registered a site name, your ad shows a single URL line next to competitors’ two-line listings.
My take
This is the most candid statement any big Asian search engine has made about the business model after AI. Naver is telling advertisers that when an agent reads the query, compares the options and makes the booking, a “click” stops meaning much. So Naver will price on outcomes it can see inside its own system: Smart Store orders, Place bookings, Npay payments, and now partner-completed loans and insurance policies.
For SEOs and PPC teams working in Korea, I’d take three things from this:
- Measurement is going inside Naver. If billing follows transactions, the transaction data Naver gets from you (Smart Place booking, Npay, conversion tracking) becomes the thing that decides your cost and your reach. Brands that keep everything off-platform will find the AI layer knows less about them.
- Powerlink will act more like Performance Max. Budgets moving automatically “inside and outside Naver” means less placement control. Watch search-term and placement reporting closely when the overhaul lands.
- Organic visibility in AI Tab is now a route to transactions. If shopping and local journeys from AI Tab have nearly doubled, the content and Place data that AI Tab cites is the top of a funnel Naver can bill against. Being cited is no longer a vanity metric.
The 21% fall in operating profit shows how expensive this is. Naver is spending heavily now so it can sell outcomes later. Whether advertisers accept paying per transaction, and how Naver handles attribution disputes when the deal closes with a partner, is the bit I’ll be watching in the 2027 pilot.
