Brave Search is the search engine of Brave Software, Inc. (San Francisco), the private, founder-led company behind the Brave browser; the product grew out of Brave's 2021 acquisition of the Tailcat team and index and serves results from Brave's own crawl-built index, with the last Bing API calls removed in April 2023. Its privacy notice states that Brave Search collects no personal information about users, their devices, or their searches, requires no account, uses only non-unique anonymous cookies, does not retain IP addresses (temporarily processed for local results and bot detection), and reports no personal data or user identifiers to advertisers on its own search-ads network. Caveats disclosed by Brave itself: anonymous, aggregated usage metrics are on by default (opt-out in settings); Ask Brave / AI answers are processed on Amazon Web Services servers in the United States with conversation state held up to 24 hours; shopping-intent queries can be forwarded to Amazon together with the browser user agent and a truncated IP address; partner attribution tags go to Tripadvisor, Kayak, Booking and Amazon; and Brave-browser users may opt into Google fallback mixing and the Web Discovery Project, which contributes anonymized search and browsing data to the index. Brave Software discloses its founders and leadership and a 2017 USD 35 million token sale, but not its equity investors. No breach, regulatory action, or security incident specific to Brave Search was found in this research; Brave's search-side security channel is a company-wide bug-bounty program.
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Brave Search's privacy notice states that the service collects no personal information about the user, their device or their searches and requires no account; IP addresses are used transiently for anonymous local results and bot detection but are not stored, and Ask Brave (AI answers) conversation state is erased after 24 hours of inactivity with the encryption key held on the user's device.
Brave Search's usage-metrics help page states that anonymous, aggregated usage metrics (visit counts, query counts and average query length, time on site, feature and ad-click counts, OS and browser type) are collected by default and can be turned off in settings; the page states query text, IP addresses, unique identifiers and device fingerprints are not collected.
Brave's search product page describes the opt-in Web Discovery Project, through which Brave-browser users contribute anonymized data to build the Brave Search index; the FAQ itemizes that data as search queries, result clicks, URLs of pages visited in the browser, time spent on those pages and page metadata -- a browser-side collection surface that feeds the search index but is off unless the user opts in.
Brave Search's index and right-to-be-forgotten help page states that Brave Search is a product of Brave Software Inc, based in the U.S., the maker of the Brave browser, and publishes a data protection officer contact (privacy@brave.com) and a named EU nominated representative in Dublin, Ireland.
Brave's about page names co-founders Brendan Eich (CEO) and Brian Bondy (CTO) and a full leadership roster including a Chief of Search, and its key-dates timeline records the 2017 USD 35 million ICO for the Basic Attention Token and the 2021 Tailcat acquisition as the core IP and team that became Brave Search; the page discloses no equity investors or ownership breakdown for the private company.
Brave's April 2023 announcement states that every web search result in Brave Search is now served from Brave's own index, that all Bing API calls (previously about 7% of query results) were removed, that opt-in Web Discovery Project contributions helped grow the index, and that image and video searches could at that time be redirected to Bing or Google as an option rather than served through a third-party API.
Brave Search's privacy notice states that Ask Brave requests are processed on Brave's servers hosted by Amazon Web Services in the United States, with conversation state held for the duration of the conversation and erased after 24 hours of inactivity (up to 7 days if the user shares it publicly), and that users of the Brave browser may opt into Google fallback mixing, under which the browser anonymously checks Google for the same query.
Brave Search's partner-integrations page discloses that for queries with shopping intent Brave sends Amazon the query, the browser user agent and a truncated IP address (top 24 bits of IPv4 / top 48 bits of IPv6) to expand product-ad inventory, and that Brave appends fixed, non-identifying attribution tags to Tripadvisor, Kayak, Amazon and Booking links -- partner data flows that exist alongside the no-profiling policy.
Brave Search's ads help page states that when a user sees or clicks a search ad, Brave reports no personal data or user identifiers to the advertiser and provides advertisers only anonymous aggregate reports of ad clicks that led to a purchase; an ad-free experience is sold as Brave Search Premium.
As of 2026-08-16, Brave Search's own ads.txt file at search.brave.com authorizes 1 advertising system domain(s) to sell its ad inventory (2 DIRECT and 0 RESELLER entries).
Brave publishes a right-to-be-forgotten and right-to-object process for Brave Search that applies globally, lists the criteria considered, gives an email channel and states delisting can take up to 30 days; no breach, regulatory action, named-firm audit or search-specific security incident involving Brave Search was found in this research, so this pillar rests on a clean record without affirmative third-party artifacts.
Brave Search's anonymous-cookies help page states that the search engine sets only anonymous preference cookies (safesearch, country, units, location opt-out, theme, Goggles rules, fallback opt-in) whose names and values are the same for every user, so they cannot be used to identify anyone.
Privacy Guides lists Brave Search as a recommended search-engine provider on its search-engines page, whose minimum criteria require that a provider not collect PII per its privacy policy and not require an account; the listing notes that Brave Search's anonymous usage metrics are enabled by default and can be disabled in settings.
Brave Search's referrer-policy help page states that since 15 July 2022 the results page uses strict-origin-when-cross-origin, so a destination site receives only the origin https://search.brave.com and not the search query or full referring URL.