Brave faces lawsuit over selling search index to AI companies. A search engine is indexing your site and selling access to AI makers. Here's what you can actually do about it. In early November, the New York Times sued Brave, which operates both a web browser and a search engine, claiming the company indexed more than 30 billion webpages and sold access to that content to AI companies like Perplexity, Mistral, and Cohere. Brave had not filed a response when this was written. The core claim matters to you: if you run a website, there's a good chance it's in that index, and AI makers may be paying Brave to search it. Key facts. * On November 2, the New York Times filed suit against Brave, alleging the company indexed billions of webpages and sold access through its Brave Search API without notifying site owners or providing a way to block the crawler. * Brave's search index holds over 30 billion pages and Brave lists Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, and You.com as API customers on its website. * Brave's crawler does not identify itself by name, making it impossible to block separately from Google's crawler using standard website controls. * The same day the Times sued, the Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel filed a separate lawsuit against Brave on similar grounds. Can you keep Brave out of your website? Not without also keeping Google out. Brave's crawler doesn't advertise its name, so you can't block it individually using robots.txt, the standard file websites use to control which search engines can access their pages. Brave's help page states that its crawler obeys the same permissions that apply to Google's crawler. If you allow Google in, Brave comes in too. The only way to remove your pages from Brave's index is to add a noindex tag, which also removes them from Google. For most small businesses, that's not a trade-off worth making. What's actually being sold to the AI companies? Not just search results. The lawsuit quotes Brave describing what it calls "LLM Context," which hands AI companies your page content already cut into chunks, formatted and ready to use. An AI assistant can then write an answer using your information without ever sending a visitor back to your website. This is different from a traditional search engine, where someone searches, finds your page, clicks it, and lands on your site. With Brave's API, the AI company gets your content but controls whether anyone ever visits you. Should you check if you're in Brave's index? Yes, and it takes 30 seconds. Go to search.brave.com, type "site:" followed by your domain name, and see what pages show up. Everything you see is in the index Brave is selling. What you find there is a stored copy, not a live version of your site, so it may be outdated. But it's what AI companies are paying to access. What happens next? The lawsuits will take time. A court ruling in the Times case won't automatically cover other websites, but it will set a precedent about whether Brave's practices are legal. Until then, Brave continues operating as it does now. My take: this is worth watching. For now, understand that AI assistants may be quoting your content without sending visitors your way, and there's no practical way to stop it without also blocking Google. Sources. They did the reporting. The writing and the opinions here are ours. Questions people ask about this. Is my website in Brave Search's index? You can check by going to search.brave.com and searching for site:yourdomain.com. Everything that appears is in the index Brave sells to AI companies. Brave's index contains over 30 billion pages total. Can I block Brave's crawler from my website? Not separately from Google. Brave's crawler doesn't identify itself by name, so you can't block it using robots.txt. You can only remove your pages using a noindex tag, which also removes them from Google Search. What are AI companies doing with my website content? They're using it to answer user questions. Brave sells them your page content pre-formatted and cut into chunks. An AI assistant can write an answer using your information, but it's up to the AI company whether that answer includes a link back to your site. Will this lawsuit change anything for my business? The case is still early and Brave had not filed a response when this was written. A ruling could eventually change how search engines handle AI access, but that will take months or longer. What should I do about this right now? Check if you're in Brave's index using the site search. Beyond that, you cannot block Brave without also blocking Google, which most businesses depend on for traffic. This piece is about Brave Sells Its Search Index To AI, And Your Website Is Probably In It via @sejournal, @slobodanmanic, published by Search Engine Journal. Go read the original; the opinions here are ours and the reporting is theirs.

Brave sells its search index to AI, and your website is probably in it via @sejournal, @slobodanmanic. Brave sells its search index to Cohere, Mistral, and Perplexity. A 30-second site: search shows whether your pages are part of it.

Brave puts Rerank on Ask Brave - Users can boost or hide domains feeding AI answers. Last Updated: November 6, 2026 Two days after the New York Times and three Tribune papers sued Brave over Ask Brave, the Search API and paywall behaviour, Brave pushed a quieter product note that matters more for day-to-day SEO measurement than another lawsuit filing. On 5 November the company said it had added Rerank to Ask Brave, and reminded everyone that the same controls already sit on standard Brave Search. Users can open the two-arrow control on the results page and thumbs-up or thumbs-down whole domains. Raised domains get a bump. Discarded domains drop out of that person's result set. The formal product page on brave.com/whats-new/rerank frames it as free customisation for every search on search.brave.com. The deeper technical note is in Brave's own help centre: Rerank is "light weight Goggles" applied to normal searches. Rules live in cookies on the device. On each request Brave builds an ephemeral Goggle and applies it at ranking time. Raised domains move up. Discarded domains are not candidates for the final set. Brave is explicit that this is not a replacement for full Goggles - it is the accessible front door. Why Ask Brave changes the stakes. Rerank on blue links was already awkward for rank trackers. Two people can type the same query and see different orderings if one has boosted a specialist publisher and the other has discarded a listicle farm. Extending that preference layer into Ask Brave means some of the retrieval feeding the generative answer can diverge as well. Brave's earlier Answer-with-AI documentation already said some, though not all, of the information in an AI answer can come from a user's modified result set. The 5 November push simply puts that control next to the product publishers are now litigating over. That is the part SEOs should not shrug at. Baseline Brave rankings - the ones your tracker sees from a clean browser - are still useful. They are no longer a promise that every Ask Brave user is looking at the same source pool. A domain you never "lose" in aggregate reporting can still be discarded by a cohort of power users, or boosted into their answer stack by another cohort. You will not see either move in a third-party SERP crawl. Privacy, cookies and what Brave will not do. Brave's help page is unusually candid about the privacy trade. The company says it does not track queries, and that Rerank is no exception. It also admits that a unique raise/discard set could itself act as an identifier. Preferences stay local; clearing the relevant cookies clears the rules. There is no publisher dashboard, no public count of how many users have boosted your domain, and no claim that one user's thumbs-up changes anyone else's index. If someone tells you Rerank is a new global ranking factor, they have not read the docs. What I would do. Keep measuring clean-browser Brave positions, especially while Brave's search share is still climbing after the 130.77 million MAU and 2.71 billion October searches Readisi covered this week. Separately, spot-check Ask Brave answers for your money queries with and without a couple of deliberate Rerank rules, so you know how brittle your citations look when a user rewrites the retrieval layer. And if you publish material that Brave users repeatedly find noisy, remember discard is sticky for that person until they reverse it - stronger than simply scrolling past you once. Rerank will not settle the publisher lawsuits. It does tell you how Brave wants to sell "user choice" while Ask Brave is under fire: put the ranking dial in the reader's hand, store it locally, and call it personalisation you can see.