I've been using Kagi for ~18months and your description doesn't match my experience at all.
Querying for something like "snowflake json from variant?" in both engines and in google I get a sort-of-right-but-not-really-that-helpful ai summary about "parse_json" function. In Kagi I get an actually useful summary with code examples of parse_json, but also the colon-based syntax for accessing values inside nested objects without needing to parse anything.
I very rarely need to go into a page, I use Kagi quick search summary with the "?" suffix and it almost always gives me a useful answer in one-shot.
First of all, the parent comment's point is that Kagi is often be praised for being like so-called-old-Google[0]. So it's only reasonable to assume they only care about the links, not the LLM summary. What you described is even further from old Google.
Second, if you want this kind of LLM-digested search result, Google AI studio blows everything out of water (including Google search, obviously).
[0] I've never bought into the idea that old Google was so much better. But it seems to be a very popular opinion on HN. ymmv.
But then you're not using kagi search just the LLM
No, the responses are backed by searches.
That doesn't make it the same as search results
So some guy does hard work developing some technique or solving some problem. He documents his experience, puts up a tutorial on DO or AWS or somewhere else, and the ads on that document help offset the cost of hosting. Now comes along Kagi, scrapes that data, and presents it to you, their paying customer.
I see a problem with this.
One way or another the ad driven model has to go. It’s toxic for society.
Do you pay LLM providers for agentic features? From your past submissions, you certainly seem to. Do those features make web searches and curl the results?
Were the models underlying those features trained on all available web content, or are they unlike any other enterprise models out there?
At any rate, you should see a bigger problem in what Google does, which you don't seem to.
Try g.ai. It's stupid fast and uses google indexes. Kagi? sometimes doesn't correctly parse intent, in Google thing you can just ask function doing this and gives you it, with examples, grounding and extremely fast. I'm paying for kagi since the begging and I guess id cancel it because it gives not so much added value