How does Brave Search work?
Brave Search works by crawling and ranking the web with its own index and filling only rare gaps with third-party results. Brave’s independence page says most results pages contain zero third-party results, and that the remainder comes from anonymous API calls, mainly to Bing and Google, used for some queries or result types such as images. Brave states that its index is intentionally smaller than Google’s or Bing’s to keep out spam and low-quality pages.
Key features of Brave Search are:
- Private queries: no user profiling for search or ads.
- Goggles: custom rule sets that re-rank results, written in a domain-specific language and capped at 10,000 instructions.
- AI summaries: the Summarizer, launched in 2023, answers 30 to 40% of searches with cited summaries.
- Ask Brave: a chat mode combining search results with an AI conversation, launched on 29 September 2025.
- Search API: paid access to the index for developers and AI companies, at 5 USD per 1,000 requests.
History of Brave Search: key dates
Brave Search grew from an acquired German project into a search engine with over 2 billion monthly queries. Brave Software was founded in 2015 by Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, and Brian Bondy. The search index comes from Tailcat, a project bought from Cliqz, part of Hubert Burda Media.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| June 2021 | Brave Search beta launches with an independent index |
| October 2021 | Default in the Brave browser in the US, Canada, UK, France and Germany |
| June 2022 | Beta ends, full release |
| 30 May 2024 | Search Ads leave beta, Brave reports 10 billion yearly queries |
| 29 September 2025 | Ask Brave launches |
| July 2026 | 2.46 billion monthly queries, added to Chrome’s default search engine list |
The Brave browser itself had 122.55 million monthly and 51 million daily active users in July 2026.
Brave Search market share
Brave Search has a very small share of total search traffic. Statcounter’s September 2026 data does not list Brave among the top engines worldwide or in Poland, where search is led by Google with 89.56%, Bing with 7.38% and DuckDuckGo with 0.79%. Expect Brave referrals in analytics to stay a fraction of a percent for most sites.
Brave Search in SEO and AI search
Brave Search matters to SEO because its index feeds AI assistants that many people use daily. In March 2025, TechCrunch reported that Anthropic had added Brave Search to Claude’s subprocessor list and that Claude’s web search returned the same citations as Brave. Mistral’s Le Chat announced in February 2025 that it would use the Brave Search API for live web results. A page missing from Brave’s index can be missing from those AI answers too.
In practice I check three things:
- Indexing: search site:yourdomain.com on search.brave.com and compare the count with Google.
- Crawl access: make sure robots.txt and firewalls do not block Brave’s crawler.
- Content clarity: write definitions and facts that Brave’s Summarizer can quote, which supports Generative Engine Optimization.
I include this check in AI SEO services, because visibility in AI answers starts with being present in the indexes they use.
Brave Search vs Google
| Feature | Brave Search | |
|---|---|---|
| Index | Own, intentionally smaller | Own, largest on the web |
| Tracking | No user profiling | Personalised with account data |
| Ads | Contextual, no personal data | Google Ads, audience targeting |
| Result control | Goggles re-ranking | None for users |
Frequently asked questions about Brave Search
Who owns Brave Search?
Brave Search is owned by Brave Software, the company behind the Brave browser. Brave Software was founded in 2015 by Brendan Eich and Brian Bondy.
Does Brave Search use Google results?
Brave Search answers most queries from its own index. For some queries or result types, such as images, it adds anonymous results from third parties like Google and Bing.
How many people use Brave Search?
Brave reported about 2.46 billion monthly search queries in July 2026. The Brave browser had 122.55 million monthly active users in the same month.
Which AI tools use Brave Search?
Mistral's Le Chat announced it uses the Brave Search API for live web results. In 2025 TechCrunch reported strong evidence that Anthropic's Claude also uses Brave Search for web search.
Related terms
- Brave Search gains a spot on Chrome's engine list at 2.46 billion queries · PPC Land
- Search independence · Brave Search
- Brave Search · Wikipedia
- Anthropic appears to be using Brave to power web search for its Claude chatbot · TechCrunch
- Search engine market share Poland · Statcounter
- Brave (web browser) · Wikipedia
