Yeah… I really like the idea of ad-free business models personally, but for our purposes I’m finding it hard to recommend. This is Privacy Guides and not Ad-blocking Guides, and I disagree with the notion that advertising is inherently linked to tracking, when other search engines like DDG and Brave have proven that isn’t the case. The advertising industry has been around for centuries, invasive tracking has only been a part of that for a few decades.
Ads are certainly annoying,—and I’d personally rather pay someone like Kagi instead of screwing over an ad-dependent business by using an adblocker—but being ad-free doesn’t give Kagi a privacy benefit over the competition in my opinion, and that’s really the only criteria I can consider here.
Given that we have 4 search engines which meet our existing criteria and are also quite good—and one of them (DDG) gives you the option to disable ads natively for free, as @anon62252234 pointed out—I’m just not seeing a compelling reason to modify our criteria to be inclusive of a product like Kagi.
For this reason I’m going to mark this thread as rejected for now, and add a reminder that just because we don’t include something on the website doesn’t mean we’re recommending against it, it just means that we have no official opinion one way or the other. I’m still happy that @TisButMe stopped by to clarify our questions here for us (thank you!), and if anyone has any remaining feedback on Kagi or my thoughts here, this thread is always open 
As a side note, as I’m looking through pages like Kagi vs. The Competition I don’t think Kagi is taking into account Brave Search features like Goggles in their comparison (although Kagi’s website block/boosting does look more user friendly).