This is a naive take. SEO schemes are attractive for companies that sell products themselves (e.g. try searching anything related to ETL tools). The content itself is the ad and you won’t find any ad serving scripts or affiliate links in there.
(Source: have created such schemes, although would generally not recommend them to my customers nowadays)
Underestimate the average Kagi user at your own peril. I do not think many would fall prey to an LLM generated content marketing page and end up buying a product from such site. Much likelier scenario is the page gets instantly blocked/reported.
They want to index companies that sell products. I don't see a big problem here if a company that sells a product I'm searching for, who happens to also have low-quality SEO content, shows up in that search.
In fact, I would rather they not get penalized for it, since low-quality SEO content is a good way to show up in certain other search engines (Google), and every business wants to show up in Google, making that content quite common even from reputable businesses making a quality product.
As someone who in a past life spent loads of time doing of SEO I cannot help but find this argument flawed.
So, we shouldn’t penalize low quality, SEO, spam because of people’s wants? I do want them to penalize those sites because they are a disservice and more often than not crappy, unsecured WordPress that drowns out those that are not spam.
Thank you Kagi team! A shame how far Google’s results have fallen.
Edit: also SEO is one of the more seedier parts of the software industry. Tons of unaware small businesses conned into these awful, low quality sites. I literally quit because it was so morally bankrupt.
(Source: have created such schemes, although would generally not recommend them to my customers nowadays)