Naver's answer to the AI-search creator drain: pay for the citations, and they came

Naver's Mate program compensates creators whose content the AI Briefing cites - one month later, citations to partner creators jumped 48.3%, with AI Briefing now serving 27% of searches. A working answer to the traffic-collapse problem.

The fact

Naver has published month-over-month numbers on Naver Mate, the program that pays creators whose posts its AI Briefing cites. Citations to Mate partners rose from 355.82 million in April to 528.02 million in May 2026 - a 48.3% jump. AI Briefing now accounts for 27% of Naver's total search queries, up from 20% in December 2025; the target is 40% by year-end. Roughly 3,000 creators are selected monthly across blogs, cafes, Knowledge iN and premium content, with a base stipend of ₩300,000/month and top performers earning up to ₩10 million.

Our read

Google and Reddit are fighting the AI-scraper question in court. Naver is running the opposite experiment: license the citation flow, price it, and see if creators stay. The 48% jump suggests the answer, at least in Korean-language search, is "yes." The interesting number isn't the citations - it's the 27% share of queries served through AI Briefing. That's a live measurement of how quickly a national search engine is being reshaped by generative summaries, in a market where the platform still controls the creator relationship.

What to watch

Whether the 40% year-end target holds as Naver pushes AI Briefing into shopping and vertical queries - today's mix is heavily general knowledge. And whether the Mate economics scale: 3,000 creators is manageable, but the traffic loss lives in the long tail.