I am a Kagi user and have been for 7 months now. I signed up for the 300 searches per month plan because I felt like that would fit me well enough and it turns out I average 87 searches per month. That's a lot lower than I thought it would be by quite a bit.
brave has state in the past they use the googlebot user agent, if all reddit does is check the useragnet, it won't block brave. This does however mean brave is violating the robots.txt file.
I saw some mentions of google fall back, I don't know if they still do it, but that could be another possibility.
Brave ignores robots.txt files
Brave paid for access
No matter the reason, well behaving crawlers will no longer crawl reddit, Everything is disallowed in the robots.txt
Oh 100%. You can try kagi out on a free trial, which is what I'm on. It's nice because you get different search results that aren't constrained to the Google algorithm.
What I mean by this, I search for recipes a lot, on Google all the recipes are identical. When I use Kagi, they differ with the main search team I want.
I plan on using Kagi and subbing when I have the money.
It's better to pay for a product than be the product imho.
edit: for the recipes I mean on Google it's the same promoted main steam food network bs, etc every. Single. Time. With Kagi I feel like it's smaller people with recipes with more relevancy to the terms I type in.