No. AI Search does not use your message credits. Visitors can search as much as they like without it affecting the allowance your AI agent draws on.
What message credits are for
Message credits are spent when your AI produces a conversational reply. That covers your AI agent answering customers on any channel, your AI Page answering visitors, the internal co-pilot drafting suggestions, and the Mando Assistant answering you.
AI Search is none of those. It helps people find your published content rather than holding a conversation, so it is counted separately.
What this means in practice
You can put AI Search on a busy site without watching your credit balance. A spike in searches will not stop your agent replying to customers, and running out of message credits will not stop search working.
The two are genuinely independent, which makes AI Search a good way to deflect common questions without spending your conversational allowance on them.
What AI Search does count against
Your plan limits how many AI Search apps you can have, and the content you make searchable counts toward your page limit like any other content.
So AI Search is not free of limits, it simply draws on a different one.
The same applies to your published content
Your help center and newsroom do not use message credits either. People reading your published articles costs nothing, however much traffic you get.
Frequently asked questions
What if my message credits run out?
AI Search keeps working normally.
Do searches count anywhere?
Not against message credits. Your plan limits the number of search apps, and the content counts toward your pages.
Which features do use credits?
Your AI agent, your AI Page, the co-pilot and the Mando Assistant.