I suspect Kagi is running a multi-step agentic loop there, maybe something like a LangGraph implementation that iterates on the context. That burns a lot of inference tokens and adds latency, which works for a paid subscription but probably destroys the unit economics for Google's free tier. They are likely restricted to single-pass RAG at that scale.

> works for a paid subscription but probably destroys the unit economics for Google's free tier

Anyone relying on Google's free tier to attempt any research is getting what they pay for.