• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

AI-based search engines continue to try and replace Google. The most recent entrance comes from a division of Public Good, a digital marketing company acquired by Ad.com in early July.

The company has launched an AI search engine—search.com—offering consumer cash back options, revenue share for publishers and an ad-organized environment for brands.

“To build brand love and loyalty you need moments of motivation through machine learning and AI,” Melissa Anderson, president of Public Good, told MediaPost. “What a great time for brands to meet people during moments of motivation within the context of what they want to chat about.”

The AI-based search engine is accessible via desktop and mobile on iOS and Android operating systems. About 150,000 users sign up daily.

“We flipped the script,” Anderson said. “We don’t change a subscription fee and pay the user to use the platform.”

The service provides cash back to users through Coin Credit payable through PayPal, unlike other AI-based pro engines from OpenAI, Grok, and others. A dashboard shows the amount of cash accumulated as someone signs up, uses the platform, and other tasks.

Think of Microsoft’s rewards cash-back program where people earn credits as they search. The subscription membership program goes even further to offer 10% cash back on purchases made.

Search.com offers news publishers, review websites and other types of blog platforms a way to monetize content by feeding it into the search.com platform and by offering white-label custom search solutions that work across their websites. They offer a way for revenue-generating through the placement of ads, Anderson said.

In a mock-up ad, Anderson demonstrated how companies like Liquid IV or any similar brand would serve up in the chat when someone searched for “what are the best electrolyte drink mixes.”

Advertising for the platform works on a cost per click performance-based revenue model. Search products have about a 20% to 25% lift in performance vs. traditional search engines like Google and Bing, Anderson said.

Search.com is a destination site, but the chat also will launch across widgets and search bars, as well as publishers and partners.

The site grabs data from a variety of large language models such as Perplexity, Gemini, DeepSeek, and OpenAI ChatGPT.