Kagi is great, but where it really shines is customization.
You can up/down rank or pin/remove entire sites
They have AI search, but I believe it’s opt in, you can also manually enable for a single search with a ? At the end.
I use Wipr for Safari- works great.
Now I searched and it seems that https://orionbrowser.com/ is available on iphones and you can install firefox extensions on it and thus ublock origin :)
Have an ad-free year :)
(Ps: I don't own an iphone and for every device, my setup is Ublock Origin + firefox/zen on android/linux/mac etc but Iphone forces its own engine so you cant install addons in firefox on Iphone but you can if you use orion which is created by kagi)
Edit: Oops haha forgot to say the most important thing at this time of year
merry christmas!
Edit2: Looks like orion supports ad blocking by default and in my experience it feels as good as ublock origin (I tested it on my mac on this website https://adblock-tester.com/ and got 100/100 on both zen + ubo and orion ootb
I am loving orion honestly too. I was writing this comment and then I was installing orion and suddenly the whole screen turned into a mini video/documentary about space for 1 minute for orion and man I really loved it.
I also get 200 free searches of kagi which is awesome, I have heard a lot about kagi so we will see but credit where's its due, the video was really good and its ootb ad blocking feels pretty good.
TLDR: try out orion browser :) (But I think you can try out brave too but honestly ubo is better / comparable than brave so you can try out both, I don't think orion's source code is available but yeah, it does have a premium feel to it.
Once again merry christmas! Hope it helps