The search engine for OnlyFans models who look like your crush

For three days In February, porn star Alex Lynx traveled to Miami for her first exclusive creator gathering where she was in full grind mode: filming reels and talking strategy with other creators. “It was like an all-girls SoHo House,” she says of the experience called The Circle that attracted more than a dozen sex workers, including Remy LaCroix and Forrest Smith.

Lynx, a former webcam model turned OnlyFans star, has a combined 2 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and X. She joined OnlyFans in 2017 with “the luxury of having my own followers,” she says, but those numbers didn’t always translate into subscriptions. That’s why she was in Miami.

“I don’t think people understand that,” says Lynx. “I do a lot of marketing. That’s the big misconception of OnlyFans — when creators join, they think it’s going to be easy. But unless you’re a marketing genius on social media, which is few and far between, it’s really hard to get found and gain followers.”

Many of OnlyFans’ 4 million creators said the same thing: Native discovery on the platform sucks. “There’s just frustration,” Lynx says. “In an ideal world, there would be this searchability advantage because it makes it a level playing field for creators.” (According to OnlyFans, the system limits its search feature as a safety precaution so users don’t accidentally stumble across content they don’t intend to see.)

It’s a problem that Presearch, a free, private, and decentralized search engine, wants to solve by launching its image-based discovery tool Doppelgänger.

Doppelgänger is the latest addition to Presearch’s Spicy Mode, a NSFW feature for searching adult content. Users can upload a photo of a celebrity — or someone they think is hot — to find OnlyFans creators who look like them. This technology matches the user with similar content creators who want an audience instead of illicit and illegal deepfake platforms. Have you ever wondered who the porn look-alikes of Sabrina Carpenter or Pedro Pascal are? No wonder anymore.

According to the company, Doppelgänger is built with specific guardrails — no tracking of what users search for, with clear age limits — and runs on the decentralized Presearch index, “which exposes content that traditional search engines and commercial AI suppress,” says Brenden Taccone, head of product and business development at Presearch.

“We’re trying to provide a place where you can be discovered by chance,” Tacon tells WIRED. “You won’t be able to do that on OnlyFans. If you’re hitting Instagram and Reddit and all these places, it’s very difficult to break through the noise.”

With 300,000 active searches per day on Presearch – according to the company – Doppelgänger is one of the first tools on the market to drive ethical discovery for adult creators at scale. Unlike traditional reverse image tools that scan the open web to determine where an image appeared or attempt to trace someone’s identity, Doppelgänger does not search the wider internet, does not display personal information, and does not attempt to identify a person. “It simply returns visually similar generic profiles based on image features, making it structurally more limited and, in many respects, more privacy-protective than standard reverse image search,” Taccone says.

However, the Doppelgänger’s accuracy could use some improvement. In multiple tests conducted by WIRED, the AI ​​appears to be better designed to find matches for women than for men. I’ve had no trouble finding Cardi B and Sydney Sweeney lookalikes. But when searching for a Michael B. Jordan lookalike, she suggested creators Chanell Heart (Match #3) and Chamile Symone, as well as Uncut Jock NYC, a Brazilian sex worker who performs in white. In fact, five women were proposed among the top 40 women in Jordan. Curious if this was a glitch, I dragged a photo of actor Jeff Goldblum — the perpetual “hottie,” according to the subreddit r/VintageLadyBoners — into the image search tool, and the top search result was of Jin B, a self-described “twink content creator,” followed by 38 suggestions of large-breasted women. (A second search for Goldblum — who, for what it’s worth, is hotter than a twink — with a different photo, didn’t fare much better; the only “similar” mention was of YCC, who is Chinese.)