It's sad that we have to pay a different company to do it, but it seems they mostly just remove junk or re-priorize Google results. Google is showing us results in a way that maximizes ad/click revenue for Google. Kagi is showing results in a way that maximizes the likelihood that you will pay Kagi for that search service itself.
This makes it sound nefarious but isn’t Kagi maximizing for subscriptions synonymous with them maximizing a great product that returns the desired results for users?