Naver Corp. plans to invest 1 trillion won (approximately $664 million) over the next five years to strengthen the quality and discovery of user-generated content that supports its artificial intelligence (AI) services, according to a company executive on Thursday.
Kim Kwang-hyun, chief data and contents officer at Naver, said the competitive landscape in AI platforms is increasingly shifting toward data quality and service differentiation rather than pure technical capability alone. He emphasized that the company intends to significantly expand its non-technical initiatives aimed at identifying high-quality content and rewarding creators who contribute meaningful material to its ecosystem.
As part of this strategy, Naver will introduce a new program called “Naver Mate” next month. The initiative will provide financial incentives to content creators based on how frequently their work is referenced by Naver’s AI-powered smart search feature, known as AI Briefing. Under the program, around 3,000 selected users each month may receive rewards of up to 10 million won depending on content performance and citation frequency.
Naver stated that its AI Briefing service, launched in March last year, uses generative AI to deliver summarized answers within search results and now serves approximately 30 million users monthly. The company also highlighted its broader ambition to reinforce the reliability and depth of AI-generated responses by grounding them in trusted, high-quality human-created content.
In addition, Naver plans to roll out a smart lens feature in June, allowing users to obtain contextual information about physical objects by capturing them through a smartphone camera. The feature is expected to further integrate AI assistance into everyday visual search experiences, expanding the company’s ecosystem beyond text-based search.
Overall, the initiative reflects Naver’s broader push to build a content-driven AI infrastructure, where creators are directly incentivized for contributing to the data foundation powering generative AI services.