Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results

Although the announcement concerns filtering paywalled links, the AI-relevant discussion quickly became a referendum on whether search is being replaced by assistants. Kagi’s assistant drew unusually strong praise because commenters see it as search-grounded rather than a generic chatbot: it looks for sources first, sticks closer to checkable facts, cites credible material, and can surface alternate product names that defeat ordinary keyword search. Several readers now start with it instead of a conventional results page, especially for research or troubleshooting where SEO clutter has made manual search exhausting. The enthusiasm is tempered by a clear diagnosis of why AI search feels necessary. The web has become dense with spam, content farms, ads, and half-answers, so assistants save time by navigating a degraded information ecosystem. But some commenters reject the conclusion that a fluent summary should replace links. They argue that models can omit context, flatten genuine ambiguity, and confidently deliver an answer where the underlying evidence is uncertain. The preferred compromise is an AI tool that remains anchored to retrieval and gives users source-level control. Filtering inaccessible pages can improve a search-assisted workflow for people unlikely to subscribe, but it also risks steering AI-era discovery away from the original reporting that produces reliable facts.