Are the responses better or worse?

I think that would require some testing and evaluation according to personal preference. My opinion is that Qwen 3 and Deepseek Chat v3.1 become much more concise when summarizing searches, but much less detailed. When used without the web search tool, they become more verbose (and express more "personality"), which may be less desirable in some contexts, but they also gave more informative answers. With Kimi K2 I seem to find the opposite; it really does well when analyzing search results (and really likes inserting tables to give break down its findings), and its "offline" version was much less detailed.

Oh, and an interesting finding: Kagi's selector indicates that they're offering Deepseek Chat v3.1's non-reasoning version, but when I ran it without web search it appears to have messed up and output some of its chain of thought, so it clearly is thinking.