Naver will begin a closed beta of its agentic search product "AI Tab" as early as next week, in the company's most substantive defensive move yet against Google's artificial intelligence-powered push into South Korea, one of a handful of major markets where Google has never overtaken the local incumbent.
The timing is notable. Google launched Gemini in Chrome in Korea on Monday, embedding its AI assistant directly into the browser that holds roughly 70 percent of the global market. Four days later, Naver confirmed that hundreds of employees have been testing AI Tab internally since April 17, with a public beta expected by month's end or in early May, according to industry sources.
AI Tab will sit alongside the existing News, Blog and Cafe tabs on Naver's search results page, giving users a dedicated conversational space within the country's most-used search interface. This is a distinct feature from Naver's year-old AI Briefing, which only summarizes results at the top of the page.
Naver 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. Rather than crawling the open web in the manner of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, Naver is co-producing exclusive material with partners including public broadcaster EBS and encyclopedia publisher Doosan.
The arrangement sidesteps copyright disputes that have dogged other AI firms and locks up Korean-language content competitors cannot access.
That data enclosure is 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.
"AI Tab is positioned as execution-oriented agentic AI that makes judgments based on Korean users' experience data," said Woo Yeon-moon, who leads Naver's AI search initiatives.
Whether that is enough is unclear. Naver held 63.83 percent of the Korean search market in March against Google's 28.67 percent, per Internet Trend, but 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.
mjh@heraldcorp.com
