Google has mixed its search ads between and throughout the organic (free) search results starting sometime mid-last year. Google calls it dynamic ad placement, and it is an ongoing tests. In fact, Google had to change its definition of top ads to make way for this historically very unGoogle-like move.
I’ve tried a couple and they all return worse results on average. Scrolling down past the LLM garbage and paying attention to which results are real is less work than re-querying DDG 4 times to get a decent result.
I haven’t tried kagi, but I’ve heard similar anecdotes here on Lemmy. I’m not opposed to paying. The ad model is unsustainably at best.