Kagi's business model is an accessibility feature

I had a filter for “switch to Kagi” posts. It activated automatically whenever someone wrote “I stopped giving Google my data.” I understood the feeling. I just didn’t understand the urgency. If you didn’t mind ads, both the free tier and the results were fine.

Then I read Veronica Lewis’s account of using Kagi with low vision, and I understood a different problem entirely.

⚡ TL;DR

• What it solves: Visual fatigue from cluttered search results for low vision and CVI users
• The mechanism: No ads = no required clutter; Custom CSS = full visual control per user
• Best for: Anyone using screen magnifiers, assistive technology, or needing high-contrast display
• Key differentiator: 40,000-char Custom CSS editor on all plans - no other search engine offers this
• Honest tradeoff: $5/month minimum, maps still behind Google, some searches noticeably slower

The actual problem

When you have low vision - or cortical visual impairment (CVI) - scanning a cluttered page isn’t just annoying. It burns through your available attention fast.

Every element you process costs something. Sponsored results at the top. An AI Overview summary nobody asked for. An autoplay video that ignores your device settings. A shopping carousel. Then, somewhere underneath all of that, the actual results.

For most people this is friction. For someone with CVI, it’s more like doing arithmetic with loud music playing - not impossible, just tiring in a specific way that compounds over a day.

Lewis describes it plainly: “I was using so much of my energy to look at useless content that it made it challenging to focus on the things that I actually needed.”

The insight that runs through her whole post: an ad-supported search engine cannot be accessible by design, because the ads are the design.

What Kagi’s results page actually looks like

Kagi’s results page has no display ads, no autoplay media, no sponsored results, and no AI summary pushed to the top by default. The Quick Answer feature exists but is hidden unless you enable it. Results appear with clean spacing. That’s it.

That last sentence is doing more work than it looks like. On Google every unnecessary element is someone’s quarterly target. On Kagi every unnecessary element is a failure to serve the person paying for the product.

The Custom CSS editor: the feature nobody writes about

Kagi has a custom CSS editor. Forty thousand characters. Available on all plans. It restyling the entire search and landing page is within scope.

One line of CSS hides the AI summary box permanently:

.searchResultAnswers {
  display: none;
}

Same pattern removes anything else. Boost font weight. Increase line spacing between results. Change link colors for higher contrast. Resize spacing around clickable areas.

Lewis published a high-contrast purple theme on GitHub Gist showing how far this goes. Kagi’s default is already cleaner than Google. With custom CSS it becomes precisely calibrated to how your specific eyes work.

No other search engine comes close to this. Google doesn’t expose a CSS editor. Bing doesn’t. DuckDuckGo doesn’t. Kagi does, and it’s on the $5/month plan.

The features that compound

Custom CSS is the headline, but several smaller features add up:

Per-device font size. Small through Larger - stored separately for mobile and desktop. If you use different zoom levels on your phone and laptop, Kagi remembers both.

Left-aligned results. Reduces horizontal eye movement when using screen magnification. Sounds trivial. For someone with a restricted visual field, it isn’t.

Lenses. Saved filters that narrow results to source types: Forums, Academic, Programming, and custom ones you define. Lewis created lenses specific to low vision and assistive technology research - one click instead of a long exclusion string.

Domain control. Shield icon on each result → block, lower, raise, or pin that domain in future searches. Permanently banish low-quality SEO farms from appearing again.

Keyboard navigation. j/k to move between results, / to focus the search bar, Enter to open the highlighted result. One HN commenter summed it up: “Using vim keys for navigating search results is such a fantastic user experience, and much like normal vim I’m not sure I could go back to navigating search any other way.”

Bangs. !w redirects directly to Wikipedia. Custom bangs for any site you use regularly. !help setting default search engine opens the relevant Kagi documentation page immediately.

Who this matters to beyond people with low vision

One of the better observations in the HN thread came from someone without visual impairment:

“The neurodiverse face similar struggles of having to wade through reams of completely superfluous content to get to anything usable. I’ve never thought to turn [text-to-speech] onto a Google search results page. It’s abysmal. Of course Google is an accessibility nightmare.”

The custom CSS editor and domain blocking are useful for anyone who finds search results visually overwhelming - people with attention differences, cognitive fatigue from any cause, or just a preference for information without decoration. Lewis built a tool tuned for her own visual system. It turns out the constraints she needed are useful for a broader group.

The honest tradeoffs

What works well	What you give up
No-ads results page	$5/month minimum, no permanent free tier
40K custom CSS on all plans	Maps still behind Google
Per-device font and theme settings	Some searches noticeably slower
Domain blocking and personalization	Local/location-based results lag
Keyboard navigation	SaaS trust model (US-hosted)

The privacy angle came up in the thread too. Your searches tie to an account, which ties to payment info. Kagi offers Privacy Pass (RFC 9576, open-source, audited via Cloudflare’s implementation) so you can disconnect your account identity from individual queries. Whether that’s sufficient depends on your threat model. It’s more carefully designed than most SaaS services, but it is still US-hosted SaaS.

The thing worth holding onto

Lewis’s post does one thing unusually well: it shows that accessibility and business model alignment aren’t separate conversations. A search engine that needs to monetize your attention will always find new ways to keep you looking at things you didn’t ask for. A search engine you pay for doesn’t.

That’s not a moral argument. It’s a structural one.

For people whose vision is already managing something - low vision, CVI, fatigue, attention - removing unnecessary load isn’t polish. It’s the feature that makes the product usable at all.

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Discussion on Hacker News · Source: veroniiiica.com · Submitted by speckx