Naver, South Korea's dominant search engine and the country's homegrown rival to Google, said Thursday it will invest 1 trillion won (about $670 million) over five years to enrich the content that trains its AI search products — a bet that whoever secures the best data, not the biggest model, wins the next phase of AI. Chief Data and Content Officer Kim Kwang-hyun laid out the plan at a press conference at The Plaza Hotel in central Seoul, where he argued that as model performance levels off, the value of high-quality data outweighs sheer scale.
For the roughly 20 million people who create content on Naver — and for any brand or publisher trying to be seen in Korea's largest digital ecosystem — the message is direct: the company is now paying for the raw material its AI runs on. Naver counts about 630 million pieces of content produced on its platform each year, roughly 2 million a day, across services like its question-and-answer board Knowledge iN, its blogs, and its Cafe communities.
The logic ties content directly to product quality. User-generated content accounts for about 70% of the sources cited in AI Briefing, Naver's AI search-summary feature. By rewarding the people who produce that content, Naver aims to build what it calls a virtuous cycle: better-paid creators produce better content, which produces better AI answers, which keeps users inside Naver.
Naver Treats 25-Year Content Archive as AI Search Fuel
Over 25 years, Naver built a user-generated content base that it has long used to power search. The new plan reframes that archive as AI training data at a moment when rivals are paying for the same thing — Google's $60-million-a-year content deal with Reddit is cited in Korea as part of the identical trend. Naver will route the money through a 1 trillion won "impact fund," contributing about 200 billion won a year.
How Does Naver Mate Pay Content Creators?
Beginning next month, Naver will launch Naver Mate, a program that selects 3,000 creators each month from Blog, Cafe, Knowledge iN and Premium Content and pays a combined 20 billion won a year. Selection is based on how often a creator's work is cited in AI Briefing across 10 categories such as travel, life and tech and 25 sub-topics including health, parenting and automobiles. Every selected creator receives a base 300,000 won (about $200) a month; the top 10 in each main category earn an additional 3 million won; and the single top creator earns an additional 10 million won (about $6,700) monthly. Selected profiles carry an official emblem to surface them in results, and the program expands to short-form service Clip later this year.
AI Briefing Reaches 30 Million Users; AI Tab Adds 3 Million
The spending targets products that already have scale. AI Briefing, which launched to all users in March 2025, now reaches about 30 million monthly users. A conversational feature called AI Tab, released in beta on April 28, 2026, for Naver Plus Membership subscribers, passed 3 million users within its first month. In April, Naver retired its older Clova X chatbot to consolidate around this vertical approach.
Naver Bets Vertical AI Search Beats Google's General Models
Naver's wager is that it can win in "vertical" search — where a query flows directly into a purchase, a reservation or a payment inside Naver — rather than competing head-on with the general-purpose models of Google and OpenAI. Kim said Naver may be the only operator in the world that can complete the full journey, from product search to purchase and reservation, within a single service. Naver still holds more than 60% of South Korea's search market, ahead of Google, according to 2025 government data.
HyperCLOVA X Trails Frontier Models, Researcher Cautions
The strategy has a known limit. Naver plans to fold a next-generation version of its proprietary model, HyperCLOVA X, into its services, but the model is far smaller than the frontier systems built by OpenAI and Google. A Seoul National University researcher told The Investor that Naver's real asset is two decades of localized data, and that the open question is whether its AI can become "good enough, fast enough" to convert that data into the next generation of services. The content fund is, in effect, Naver's answer to that question.
Naver Mate Launches Next Month; New Smart Lens Arrives June
Naver Mate is scheduled to begin next month, and Naver is set to release a new version of its Smart Lens visual-search tool at the end of June. Smart Lens lets users photograph an object to pull up information and act on it, and Naver expects it to pair with AI Briefing and AI Tab.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Naver AI search?
Naver AI search refers to the artificial-intelligence features built into Naver's search engine, led by AI Briefing, which summarizes results and cites its sources, and AI Tab, a conversational search mode. The features draw heavily on content created within Naver's own services rather than the open web.
How does Naver Mate pay content creators?
Naver Mate selects 3,000 creators each month based on how often their work is cited in AI Briefing and pays a combined 20 billion won a year. A base payment of 300,000 won a month goes to every selected creator, with larger top-ups for the highest-cited creators in each category.
Is Naver bigger than Google in South Korea?
Naver holds more than 60% of South Korea's search market, ahead of Google, though Google has been gaining ground. Naver's strategy focuses on "vertical" search that connects queries to actions like shopping and reservations inside its own platform.
What is HyperCLOVA X?
HyperCLOVA X is Naver's proprietary large language model, first launched in 2023 and built with a heavy emphasis on Korean language and culture. It powers Naver's AI search features, though it is smaller than the frontier models from OpenAI and Google.
Naver's pitch comes down to a single claim: that owning the data, and paying the people who make it, matters more than owning the largest model. Whether 1 trillion won is enough to prove it — against far larger rivals and a model that still trails the frontier — is the bet now in motion.
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