The Search Engine for OnlyFans Models Who Look Like Your Crush

For three days in February, porn star Alix Lynx flew to Miami for her first exclusive creator gathering where she was in full grind mode: shooting Reels and talking strategy with other creators. “It was kind of like SoHo House for OnlyFans girls,” she says of the experience, which is called The Circle and drew more than a dozen sex workers, including Remy LaCroix and Forrest Smith.

Lynx, who is a former webcam model turned OnlyFans starlet, has a combined 2 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and X. She joined OnlyFans in 2017 with “the luxury of having my own following,” she says, but those numbers haven’t always translated to subscriptions. It’s why she was in Miami.

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

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

It’s a problem that Presearch—a free, private, decentralized search engine—wants to fix with the launch of its image-based discovery tool Doppelgänger.

Doppelgänger is the newest addition to Presearch’s Spicy Mode, a NSFW feature for searching adult content. Users can upload an image of a celebrity—or any person they think is hot—to find OnlyFans creators that resemble them. The technology matches the user with similar creators who want an audience rather than to deepfake platforms that are nonconsensual and illegal. Ever wondered who Sabrina Carpenter’s or Pedro Pascal’s porn doppelgängers were? Wonder no more.

According to the company, Doppelgänger is built with specific guardrails—no tracking what users search, explicit age-gating—and runs on Presearch’s decentralized index, “which surfaces content traditional search engines and commercial AI suppress,” says Brenden Tacon, head of product and business development at Presearch.

“We’re trying to offer a place where you might serendipitously become discovered,” Tacon tells WIRED. “You won’t on OnlyFans. If you’re hustling yourself on Instagram, Reddit, and all these places, it’s so hard to break through the noise.”

With 300,000 daily active searches on Presearch—according to the company—Doppelgänger is one of the first tools on the market pushing for ethical discovery of adult creators at scale. Unlike traditional reverse image tools that scan across the open web to locate where a photo appears or attempt to trace someone’s identity, Doppelgänger does not search the broader internet, does not surface personal information, and does not attempt to identify a person. “It simply returns visually similar public profiles based on image features, making it structurally more limited and, in many ways, more privacy-protective than a standard reverse image search,” Tacon says.

Still, the accuracy of Doppelgänger could use some improvement. In multiple tests run by WIRED, the AI seems better tailored to find matches for women than men. I had no problem finding look-alikes for Cardi B and Sydney Sweeney. But when searching for Michael B. Jordan look-alikes, it suggested female creators Chanell Heart (the number 3 match) and Chamile Symone, in addition to Uncut Jock NYC, a white-presenting Brazilian sex worker. In fact, five women were suggested among Jordan’s top 40. Curious if this was a glitch, I dragged a photo of actor Jeff Goldblum—a perennial “hottie,” according to the subreddit r/VintageLadyBoners—into the image finder, and the top search result was for Jean 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 more zaddy than twink—with a different photo, did not fare any better; the lone male “look-alike” was for YCC, who is Chinese.)

According to the company, gender and ethnicity are not used as input features or ranking signals at any stage of the Doppelganger pipeline; their model is optimized purely for visual structure. Tacon says similarity results may vary—surfacing matches that cross gender lines, for example—when the resemblance is strong. He adds that “these behaviors are common across visual similarity systems and are not unique to Doppelgänger,” noting that the company is working to “improve match diversity across underrepresented creator groups.”

Like Doppelgänger, FaceSpy is another similarity search engine trained on OnlyFans creators but, according to an email the company sent WIRED, it is only used by a “few hundred [people] per day.” (The tech also doesn’t seem very advanced; when I ran the same four searches on FaceSpy, only Cardi B netted matches.) There’s also OnlyFinder, launched in 2020, which uses geolocation and various tags to help users find new creators. With Doppelgänger, Tacon says, the system does not monetize image data or identity inference. “The feature exists to enhance discovery within the platform, not to commercialize personal information.” Creators can opt out of similarity matching at any time.

Even so, look-alike finders raise concerns. Though public figures have long been subject to imitation and other forms of representation beyond their control, including deepfake nudes, “it’s another thing when it’s a private citizen or someone who is not in the public light,” says Lauren Craig Tilton, a professor of digital humanities at the University of Richmond. “One could imagine really creepy uses like taking a photo of a child or a daughter or a family member that they have an attraction to, and looking for similar people on OnlyFans.”

She worries that AI tools like Doppelgänger haven’t considered the long-term consequences.

“While it’s not, per se, illegal that this look-alike is serving as a kind of proxy for behavior that the other person didn’t consent for, it is bordering on an unethical, inauthentic relationship with the person whose image is being used,” she says. “Somehow the platform suggests that there aren’t social implications by doing this. That it’s somehow safer. But it’s not necessarily safer if one is basically changing the ideas of real people in their lives by offloading that behavior onto another group.”

Presearch’s Image Search Terms state that uploading visuals of minors is prohibited. “In theory, someone could try that, but the system will only ever return indexed OnlyFans creators, so no unrelated matches would appear,” Tacon says. Users who do so are subject to “appropriate action, including reporting to relevant authorities.” He adds that while any public platform has “social implications,” the company is “trying to make those implications as positive as possible.”

For creators like Lynx, the tool is a welcome innovation.

“We’re fucking tired,” Lynx says, who claims OnlyFans intentionally designed its search function with limited reach as a way to force creators to bring other creators onto the platform through collaboration. “We are working so hard, between social, OnlyFans content, going live, doing custom videos. It is a full-time job times 10. And a discoverability feature would probably make it a little bit easier, where we wouldn’t have to work as hard at marketing.”

Additionally, creators are facing pressure from conservative lawmakers who are calling for increased restrictions on adult content, effectively muzzling their visibility and income, with the implementation of age-verification laws and porn taxes. “I keep my Instagram so PG because of that. There are a lot of mine fields we are constantly dodging,” Lynx says.

For now, Doppelgänger only scans OnlyFans profiles, but Presearch hopes to partner with other creator-led platforms like Hidden and Fansly. In April 2025, Stella Barey, a former OnlyFans creator, launched Hidden, the first adult platform owned and operated by sex workers. Barey modeled the platform after TikTok because, like Presearch, she wanted to create a space where real creators could actually get discovered. “Hidden just offers things that I have felt for a really long time we were always missing,” including features like a ForYou page, she told WIRED last November.

Tacon—who says today’s internet is optimized for advertisers and app stores, not users or creators—believes Presearch ultimately has universal applications. The company wants to be an alternative to algorithmic gatekeepers like Google and Facebook, Big Tech platforms that control what content, information, or opportunities people see through algorithmic suppression and recommendation.

“We want to drive subscriptions to creators,” Tacon says. “We’re beginning with adult creators, but little by little, we actually want to become an advocate for all types of creators as we build out our proprietary index. We want to surface all the journalists out there, all the Substack writers, whomever, that are having trouble being indexed in Google. But we want to perfect this with adult creators first.”