News Corp countersues Brave for allegedly 'scraping' articles for AI. By Jonathan Stempel July 21 (Reuters) - News Corp, facing a lawsuit by search engine Brave Software, has filed a countersuit accusing it of "flagrant theft" in distributing and selling versions of articles from the Wall Street Journal and New York Post to AI companies. Brave had last year preemptively sued the media giant, seeking a court declaration that its practices were legal. It sued after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from News Corp, which is led by the family of Rupert Murdoch. In a Tuesday filing in the Oakland, California, federal court, News Corp said Brave's unauthorized "covert scraping" and resale of its copyrighted articles fall "nowhere near the bounds" of legally acceptable conduct known as fair use. "The more content Brave copies and sells, the more revenue it generates, and the less incentive AI companies have to negotiate licenses with the publishers who produced the content," the lawsuit said. "Brave profits while publishers are cut out." News Corp is seeking an injunction and unspecified monetary damages, plus damages of up to $150,000 per infringement. Brave and its lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside business hours. The competing lawsuits are part of a wave of litigation pitting publishers against technology companies that want to use copyrighted content to support AI. BRAVE ACCUSED NEWS CORP OF DISRUPTING AI Brave sued News Corp in March 2025, seeking a court declaration that bundling copyrighted articles that can be licensed and sold is not copyright infringement. It filed a revised complaint in May 2026, following what News Corp called failed negotiations for a "fair, market-based agreement." Brave has argued that its indexing of News Corp content to make it searchable, and providing users with snippets and "high-level summaries" of that content, amounted to fair use. The San Francisco-based company also accused News Corp of threatening to disrupt advances in generative AI, which it said many consider "the most important innovation so far this century." BRAVE ACCUSED OF 'TACKY TECH TRAFFICKING' News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson said in a statement that Brave's looting of his company's content reflected "blatant disregard" for the damage to how information is disseminated. "This era of tacky tech trafficking must come to an end if journalism is to have a sustainable future," Thomson said. Brave has said it is the smallest of the three U.S.-based companies to operate independent search engines "at scale." Google dominates that market, followed by Microsoft, which operates Bing. The New York Post, Dow Jones and News Corp's British and Australian operations are also defendants in Brave's lawsuit. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

Brave Place Search API: the Google Maps alternative that costs 6-7x less. Published Jul 8, 2026 Today Brave is releasing the improved Brave Place Search API. It's a single endpoint for finding places in the physical world (such as businesses, landmarks, and points of interest) drawn from its index containing about 200 million points of interest worldwide, and growing. This API is the backbone of place search in Brave Search, which handles over 2.2 billion queries a month and powers the Brave Search map. The improved version is available today for public access through the Brave Search API, on the Search plan, at a flat $5 per 1,000 requests. Two things make the Place Search API worth your attention. First, the quality is comparable to Google Maps, as you will see on the experiment below (which tested a side-by-side comparison of Brave's Place Search endpoint with 1,000 real queries). Second, Brave's Place Search API is available at a fraction of the cost of the Google Maps API (which starts at $32 to $35 per 1,000 requests). This makes Brave 6 to 7 times more affordable for comparable place search. This post details what the API returns, where it's useful, how it measures up to Google Maps, and why building on Brave's independent search stack matters. What it does. One endpoint, accessing an index of about 200 million points of interest worldwide, as well as cities, countries, regions, and streets. This is the backbone of place search in Brave Search, which handles and powers the Brave Search map. Send a query and a place to look: curl "https://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/local/place_search?latitude=37.7749&longitude=-122.4194&q=coffee+shops&radius=1000" -H "X-Subscription-Token: <YOUR_API_KEY>" No coordinates? Use a name instead, such as location=tokyo japan. Drop the query entirely and you get Explore mode: a snapshot of what's around a point, ideal for map views. It even works without any location hints at all, doing a global search instead. Every result comes back ready to render: * Name, URL, coordinates, and full postal address * Ratings, review counts, price range, categories, and cuisine * Opening hours (including today), phone, email, and timezone * Photos and distance from your search center All these attributes are available on a flat rate of $5 per thousand requests. Compare that with Google, which charges you more for additional attributes. Need deeper data? Every result carries an id. Pass it to /local/pois for more detail or /local/descriptions for AI-written summaries. The best part: those IDs also come from Web Search results, so one integration covers your local and Web surfaces at once. Useful in multiple ways for apps and agents. You know your product better than Brave do. So Brave won't tell you what to build. But the data is rich enough that one call covers jobs you'd otherwise wire up several APIs to handle: * "Near me" discovery: restaurants, gyms, EV chargers, ATMs. Anchor to coordinates, set a radius, render a ranked list. * Travel guides: explore mode plus the cities panel shows what's worth seeing, then drills into hotels and attractions. * Business directories: try "find a location near you" functionality without licensing a maps stack. * Map dashboards: zoom_level hints and coordinates drop straight into your tiles. * Geofenced nudges: try searches like "three highly-rated lunch spots within 500m." * AI agents: structured, current place data a model can reason over. The point is the breadth. Where you take it is up to you. Note the radius parameter will bias toward an area rather than hard-cutting at the edge. Under ~20 km it gives tight "near me" results. For a famous landmark, go wide or skip it. Match it to the job and results stay clean. How it compares to Google Maps. Google Maps is the more mature product, and Brave won't claim otherwise. But the question that matters is whether Brave is good enough to build on, and what you gain by choosing it. To answer it, Brave ran 1,000 real, global, and multilingual place queries through both Brave and Google Maps. An LLM judge scored every pairing on recall, precision, ranking, and overall quality. The result: a close second in overall quality: 6.4 vs 7.3 out of 10. The two engines aren't tied in character, though. They win in opposite places. That's the useful part. Where Brave wins: * Coverage: Brave returns more of the places that actually exist (recall 7.2 vs 6.8). Google often returns fewer. * Ambiguous names: Search "africa" near Johannesburg. Brave returns local businesses named "Africa" a kilometer away. Google returns the continent, 2,000 km out. Brave won this query type on recall 8.0 vs 6.1. * Streets and addresses: For queries like "waka sakai line", Google's place API often returns one far-away result or nothing. Brave returns the right nearby ones. For the long tail of real local queries (e.g. names, addresses, streets, or anything fuzzy) - Brave is more likely to hand back something useful and close. Where Brave trails: * Category ranking: For "kebab near me," Google floats closer results to the top more reliably. * Fuzziness: Broader coverage drags in off-topic results sometimes (precision 6.2 vs 8.2). So who should switch? If you live in the long tail of names, addresses, and streets, or you value coverage, Brave is a strong fit today. If your traffic is mostly clean category search where precision is everything, Google's Place Search API has an edge, but that edge is small. Try it on your queries. Considering the price of the Brave Search API, it's also worth exploring combining Brave and Google options to create an ensemble. Caveats of the evaluation: The judge of the Brave-vs-Google Place Search API evaluation was an LLM (Opus4.8) which is extremely competent but not free of quirks. For instance, Brave has seen a bias towards length of the listings, where the judge rewards verbosity even if explicitly instructed not to. Another important caveat not captured by the judge is data-staleness. In that regard, Google has an edge that is hard to beat, as many business owners update changes on opening hours, phone numbers, etc. on the Google Business Profile before they do it on the Web itself. Brave get the data out of its Web crawler and Web Discovery Project (WDP) signals, which are by definition more limited than the direct input business owners give to Google. The price difference, in full. Brave is a flat $5 per 1,000 requests, with every field included. And each plan includes $5 in free credit every month. Google charges per SKU. The endpoints you'd use sit at the top of its price table. | / | Brave Place Search | Google Text / Nearby Search (Pro) | | Per 1,000 (entry) | $5.00 | $32.00 (Enterprise: $35.00) | | Pricing model | Flat, all fields included | Tiered by SKU and field mask | | Free allowance | $5/month | Capped per SKU. Universal $200 credit removed | At the entry tier, Brave is 6 to 7 times cheaper. And that's before Google's field-mask tiers push you higher. With Brave, ratings, hours, and photos all ride the same call. (Google figures are from its official pricing table, 2026. Volume discounts exist for both.) Built on an independent index. Most search APIs scrape their data from Google. That carries real risk for anyone shipping to customers. Scraping violates Terms of Service. Google has litigated against providers over it. A scraped feed can be throttled or shut off, and it can't offer true Zero Data Retention. Brave is built differently. It runs one of only three independent, global-scale search indexes in the Western world, and the only one outside Big Tech. Brave own and operate the entire stack, Place Search included. That means: * No scraper risk: Your product does not depend on a service that unofficially scrapes Google, which is subjected to unpredictable quality of service and risk of total discontinuation. * Zero Data Retention: Queries aren't stored, logged, or tied to identities. * No conflict of interest: Brave don't train its models on your queries. * SOC 2 (Type II) attestation: Easier legal and security review. * One platform, one set of IDs: Place Search, Web Search, POI details, and AI descriptions share IDs and the same $5/1k plan. If you're building with AI. Frontier models are becoming a commodity. The context you feed them is now what sets your application apart. Its own research proves it. Ask Brave runs an open-weights model (Qwen) on Brave's LLM Context API. It goes head-to-head with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode (and wins) on the strength of better grounding data alone. Place Search is the local half of that story. An agent that recommends a restaurant or answers "what's open near me" needs structured, current place data. This endpoint returns exactly that, on the same Search plan as the LLM Context API. Web knowledge and world knowledge, one subscription. To move faster, the API ships with Skills for Cursor, OpenCode, and Claude Code, plus an API Assistant in the portal that points you to the right endpoint and code. Start now. curl "https://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/local/place_search?location=paris+france&q=museums&country=FR" -H "X-Subscription-Token: <YOUR_API_KEY>" Place Search is live on the Search plan. $5 per 1,000 requests. $5 in free credit every month. Enough to build something real today. * Subscribe and get a key * Read the API reference * Load the Brave Search API Skills into your AI editor Pricing sources:

Brave Browser & Search Engine expands into France and Germany with key hires. Jun 15, 2026 After establishing itself in the UK, US and Canada, the independent browser and search engine moves to boost European presence London, UK, 15 June 2026: Brave Browser & Search Engine, the independent, privacy-first browser and search engine, has announced its expansion into continental Europe, appointing Zouher Yahia and Thomas Bindl as Senior Ad Sales Directors for France and Germany respectively. The European expansion comes after two years in which Brave has successfully established its brand and business in the UK. Brave Search is the third-largest global independent search engine, with an index of over 40 billion webpages and a monthly volume of more than 2 billion queries. It is the default search engine for most new users of the Brave browser, which has more than 117 million users. It does not collect personal data or build user profiles, and by default it also blocks invasive ads and trackers, third-party data storage and browser fingerprinting. During 2025, against a backdrop of modest increases in search spend - up 5.8% year-on-year according to the most recent AA/WARC Advertising Expenditure Report - search queries via the Brave browser grew by 55%, while advertising revenues grew by 400%. Unlike most browsers that typically serve numerous ads per search query, creating a cluttered, low-performance environment for advertisers, Brave serves only one ad per query, giving brands the opportunity to own their vertical. This has attracted the leading online search advertisers, including Amazon, Booking.com, eBay, Etsy, Nerdwallet, Priceline, StubHub, T-Mobile, TurboTax and Wayfair. The non-intrusive ad experience has also led to a user opt-out rate of less than 1%. "Zouher and Thomas are the perfect hires to lead our expansion into France and Germany," said Rich Rosenzweig, VP Global at Brave Ads, Brave's advertising division. "What we've seen from our experience in the UK, US and Canada is that people are fed up of being tracked, fingerprinted and spammed with irrelevant advertising everywhere they turn on the internet. We are bucking the trend in search, as the growth in our revenues and search query numbers in 2025 shows. I think the people of France and Germany who want a safer, more private and more relevant browsing experience will welcome the launch of Brave in their countries." Press Contact: Maryum Sheikh, Senior Press Account Manager at The Digital Voice(TM) About Brave Browser & Search Engine Brave is helping brands and agencies navigate the future of digital advertising in a privacy-first world. It is redefining how advertisers connect with audiences through a browser and search engine built on transparency, user control, and performance. The Brave browser is used by over 117 million people worldwide. It blocks third-party ads and trackers by default for fast, private browsing. It also offers a wealth of helpful features including a VPN and an AI browsing assistant. Brave is one of just three web search indexes at scale in the West, and it's the only one commercially available in a reliable, independent Search API. It provides users with accurate, AI-enhanced answers without profiling them. Brave Search is available as the default search engine in Brave, or via any other browser at search.brave.com. Brave is also reinventing digital advertising, with solus sponsored search result placements and the New Tab Takeover - a high-impact ad unit that offers a near-full-screen takeover of the new tab page on the Brave browser. Ads are served on the first new tab upon starting the browser, and on every third new tab thereafter. With these placements, advertisers get access to engaged, otherwise unreachable audiences.