I think this is very much about search. They just took on what Perplexity is doing with search. And I'm glad because I've been using it occasionally and now I can just keep everything in Kagi.
In my opinion, the results from Kagi Assistants are significantly inferior. I'm subscribed to both services and tried the Ultimate tier for a few days two weeks ago to test the new assistants. If they add the ability to search with multiple steps and allow the AI to digest more results, then they could be on par. It's more similar to ChatGPT at this stage, IMO.
They're literally taking on competition here.