The Quote from the FAQ explicity says "anonymized API calls". This is obviously mean that they use official API provided by these providers. And that is part of the reason why they have some high per search cost they have to cover.

Assuming they use some form of this Google API[^1], they're surely paying for the results. What bothers me is that, by paying for Kagi then, part of that monthly fee is going straight back to Google, right?

[^1]: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview

> Custom Search JSON API provides 100 search queries per day for free. If you need more, you may sign up for billing in the API Console. Additional requests cost $5 per 1000 queries, up to 10k queries per day.

It seems like that API has a limit of 10k queries per day, so I don't know if it would be feasible for Kagi to use and I thought most Google APIs were prohibited for use in a competing product.

Sure, that specific endpoint doesn't meet their criteria. But point being, they're getting results from Google, and almost certainly pay for them using my monthly fee

They are business partners with Google.

Google’s entire business is based on scraping stuff no-one asked them to so they can go fuck themselves if they don’t like it. The same applies to Facebook. The gall of these companies trying to “ban” public web scraping when they’re the prime movers in that domain is quite something.