Artprice to begin global beta test of Visual Search in December
Artmarket.com will begin a global beta rollout of Artprice Visual Search in early December 2026, before adding the tool to its Premium and Professional subscriptions in January 2027. The company presented the launch alongside an increase in third-quarter 2026 revenue.
- Global beta access begins in early December 2026.
- All Artprice subscribers can use the beta during December.
- Commercial access starts in January 2027 through Premium and Professional plans.
- Artprice says its system processes several terabytes of images and metadata.
- Artmarket.com reported increased third-quarter 2026 revenue.
Two-stage rollout
The December beta will be available throughout the month to all Artprice subscribers worldwide. According to Artmarket.com, the purpose is to let customers test the tool in real conditions, including research involving their own collections.
From January 2027, Artprice Visual Search will become part of the company’s Premium and Professional plans. Artmarket.com says those subscriptions will carry significantly higher fees because of the added functionality, and expects the beta period to encourage existing customers to move to the higher-tier offers.
The company links that migration to a structural increase in average revenue per user. It does not provide a specific revenue forecast in the announcement.
Visual search built on Artprice’s archive
Artmarket.com describes Artprice Visual Search as proprietary, vertical artificial intelligence developed over several years by teams of engineers, data scientists and art historians. The system is designed to process several terabytes of high-definition images and metadata connected with works catalogued in Artprice’s databases.
The company says that documentation accumulated over nearly 30 years has been certified by its historians and editors. Artprice was founded in 1997 and currently covers 930,000 artists, with auction tracking dating back to 1700.
Visual Search is presented as the latest part of Artprice’s AI-focused architecture, following Intuitive Artmarket, which the company describes as a general-purpose vertical AI system, and Blind Spot, its predictive and analytical algorithm for finding weak signals, market blind spots, undervaluations and hidden correlations.
Why the launch matters
Artmarket.com’s announcement positions image analysis as a central capability for art-market research. Artprice Visual Search is intended to combine the visual characteristics of a reproduction with historical metadata from the company’s records, rather than relying on visual pattern recognition alone.
Founder and chief executive thierry Ehrmann said the rollout represents the culmination of Artprice’s AI strategy, which began with the company’s creation in 1997. He also described the system as working with a collection of nearly 145 million images of artworks.
For users, the immediate change is a month of beta access followed by a commercial version limited to Premium and Professional subscriptions. For Artmarket.com, the planned pricing structure makes the tool part of a broader effort to convert subscribers to higher-value plans, while the company’s third-quarter announcement reports increased revenue without publishing figures in the supplied release.
