Kagi's main results come from Google actually.
(edit: see https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-google.html - Kagi really shows how good Google could be, since it's mostly using the Google index and then doing user-friendly things instead of user-unfriendly things on top)
I could be wrong, but I think they're playing to their early adopter audience, that being tech workers.
Google is terrible at tech searches, without verbatim and now "web" search. Kagi spending work in this area, and indexing this area, might bear good fruit.
One wonders if the popular narrative around crappification of Search is partially self-induced to prime consumers for premiumization.