Brave, the privacy-focused browser that built its reputation on blocking online advertisements, has grown to 109 million monthly active users as of February 2026 - up from 80 million in January 2025. The milestone arrives alongside renewed scrutiny of a business model that simultaneously strips publisher revenue and generates its own advertising income.

The trajectory did not happen by accident. In a Q&A published by AdExchanger on March 24, 2026, Jean-Paul Schmetz, Brave's Chief of Ads and CEO of Ghostery, laid out the philosophy behind a company that critics describe as parasitic and supporters frame as a necessary correction to surveillance-based advertising. The interview, which surfaced widely in marketing circles through a LinkedIn post by Dustin Cha, Co-CEO of Ad-Shield, reignited a conversation that the digital advertising industry has been reluctant to have in full.

From open-source browser to ad platform

Brave launched in 2016 as an open-source, ad-blocking, privacy-forward web browser, positioned explicitly as a challenger to Google's Chrome. Three years later, in 2019, shortly after exiting beta, the company began introducing what it described as opt-in, rewarded ad experiences. Users who chose to participate could earn Basic Attention Tokens (BAT), a cryptocurrency, in exchange for viewing advertisements. Those tokens could then be transferred out of the Brave Rewards wallet and converted to other digital assets or fiat currencies. Brave Ads operated with a 70 percent revenue share to users.

The scope expanded in 2021, when Brave acquired the search platform Tailcat, formerly known as Cliqz, a European company. That acquisition gave Brave the technology to build an independent search engine - and with it, a search advertising product. Schmetz was involved in building the Tailcat technology that now underpins Brave Search, making him a central figure in the platform's advertising architecture.

Since then, Brave has added further ad units. According to the AdExchanger report from March 24, 2026, the company introduced takeover display ads that appear when users open new tabs, plus limited pop-up notifications. Brave Search Ads officially exited beta on May 30, 2024, following an 18-month testing phase with brands including Amazon, Dell, and Shutterstock. At that point, Brave reported more than 10 billion annual queries and noted that a third of the top US search advertisers by media spend were already testing or running campaigns on the platform. By September 2025, Brave reached 100 million monthly users, with the search engine growing to nearly 20 billion queries per year.

How the targeting works - or rather, how it doesn't

The technical approach to ad targeting sets Brave apart from the programmatic infrastructure that dominates digital advertising. Schmetz was explicit about the distinction in the AdExchanger Q&A. "It's not programmatic," he said of Brave's method. "It's not trying to figure out that you were looking at gloves on Amazon 10 minutes ago, so I'll give you an ad for gloves."

For search advertising, the system uses only the query itself and the user's country. No demographic inference, no behavioral signals, no third-party data. According to Schmetz: "If you type 'buy lipstick,' I don't care if you're a man or woman, I'll give you a lipstick ad." For new tab takeover display ads, the only targeting dimension is country. Brave never uses third-party cookies. It does not track any ad IDs. The browser can, however, store ad exposure data locally - meaning it can determine whether a user clicked a search ad and then visited a conversion page within 30 days, through an encrypted sync feature. That data, according to Schmetz, is not accessible by Brave itself.

This model stands in sharp contrast to the programmatic infrastructure that has come under sustained antitrust pressure. US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August 2024 that Google illegally maintained monopolies in general search services and search text advertising. A separate Virginia court found in April 2025 that Google monopolized publisher ad server and ad exchange markets.

The publisher problem that the industry avoids

The business model contains a tension that Cha, writing on LinkedIn, articulated plainly. Brave blocks publisher ads to attract users. Then it serves its own ads to generate revenue for itself. Some of those ads appear as pop-ups while users browse publisher websites - websites that, simultaneously, cannot reach those users through conventional advertising.

The scale of this phenomenon is not trivial. Cha cited figures suggesting that over 1 billion users now browse the web with aggressive adblocking active. Research published in August 2025 by Ad-Shield, detailed on PPC Land, documented what researchers termed "dark traffic" - web visits that evade measurement tools and block advertisements entirely. According to that research, based on analysis of over 5 billion page views, nearly 976 million internet users generated dark traffic as of 2025, with projections pointing toward 1.1 billion by 2026. Analytics blocking affected 62 percent of those page views.

The Ad-Shield research drew a distinction between "gray traffic," which permits basic measurement and whitelisted ads, and "dark traffic," which blocks everything - analytics, cookie consent banners, subscription prompts, and paywalls. Dark traffic comprised 79 percent of adblocking instances. Cha framed it as an 18 percent revenue cut across the open web - a figure that lands differently when publishers are already navigating declining organic search traffic from AI-generated summaries.

Cha noted that analytics scripts are also blocked by these tools, creating what he called "dark traffic" - visits that go undetected entirely. The business model raises questions about precedent. Vishveshwar Jatain, responding to Cha's LinkedIn post, noted that browser toolbars were demonetized for similar behavior in a prior era, and questioned why publishers had not pursued legal action. Cha responded by pointing to Brave's promotional language around notification ads - described on the Brave website as "ads delivered via push notifications as the user browses the web" - and described it as "the most brazenly parasitic monetization model on the modern internet."

What Schmetz says about competition and Google

Schmetz addressed the Google antitrust proceedings directly in the AdExchanger Q&A. He expressed no optimism that Google would be required to divest Chrome. "Not at all," he said, when asked whether a Chrome divestiture was plausible. His reasoning was structural: a browser without a search engine or a search deal has no viable monetization path.

His proposed remedy was more specific. According to the interview, Schmetz recommended to the Department of Justice that Google be required to pay any browser that brings traffic to Google Search - regardless of whether a licensing deal is in place. Under that model, Brave users who use Google Search would generate revenue for Brave. "Why should Firefox get $400 million a year from Google and we get nothing?" he said. Judge Mehta's September 2025 ruling, which rejected Chrome divestiture while imposing behavioral restrictions, stopped short of the traffic-sharing remedy Schmetz had advocated. DuckDuckGo's CEO also criticized the same ruling as insufficient to restore competitive conditions.

On the question of mandated data sharing with competitors - another remedy included in the ruling - Schmetz noted that Google had asked the judge to stay the requirement pending appeal. Google filed an appeal in January 2026 seeking to pause that data-sharing mandate. The process, Schmetz indicated, will take considerable time.

AI search and the SEO flywheel that no longer turns

Schmetz offered a sober assessment of what AI has done to organic search traffic. "The flywheel we've had for the last 20 years has been basically dismantled, whether by AI or other things," he said. At Brave, the pattern mirrors Google - SEO, he noted, "works at Brave the same way it works at Google - as in, I would say, less and less."

For publishers, he framed the core problem clearly: if the summary of content is as good as the content itself, the value of visiting the original source diminishes. He pointed to video, podcasts, and original content as formats that require direct experience - and therefore remain defensible against AI summarization. The observation aligns with patterns documented extensively in the context of Google's AI Overviews, which the Independent Publishers Alliance formally complained about to the European Commission in June 2025, citing traffic declines exceeding 34.5 percent when AI summaries appear.

Search advertising, Schmetz noted, has never been a viable path for publishers as a revenue source in reverse - meaning publishers buying search ads to acquire visitors. The economics simply do not work: paying roughly $1 per click to monetize at a $5 CPM produces a structural loss. Publishers have historically relied on SEO, a route that AI-generated answers are steadily narrowing.

The OpenAI advertising question

Schmetz was also asked about OpenAI introducing advertisements. He called the logic sound. If users express commercial intent in their queries, organic results struggle to answer those queries well - StubHub, for example, can only run effective advertising if tickets are actually available; organic search cannot reflect live inventory. "The ad is actually quite helpful," he said.

But he drew a distinction. What OpenAI is doing, according to Schmetz, "isn't real search advertising. It's just sponsored queries." The difference, in his framing, is the specificity of the commercial signal. OpenAI began accepting advertisers for ChatGPT placements starting February 6, 2026, at premium rates.

On whether the AI sector is in a bubble, Schmetz drew a comparison to the late 1990s broadband infrastructure build-out. Capital was misallocated, some companies failed, but the infrastructure persisted. If an AI bubble collapses, he argued, portfolios and stock markets suffer - but the underlying technology does not disappear. He was blunt, however, about advertising as a rescue mechanism: "If you want advertising to save your butt when the going gets rough, that's hopeless."

What this means for digital marketing professionals

The Brave story is not primarily about one browser. It is a compressed version of a broader structural question: who has the right to monetize the attention of users as they move through the open web?

Brave's browser has been growing for years, navigating technical confrontations with platforms like YouTube over ad-blocker detection. The growth from 80 million to 109 million monthly active users between January 2025 and February 2026 represents 36 percent growth in 13 months. That trajectory has occurred alongside - not despite - the introduction of ad formats that would have seemed contradictory for a privacy-focused browser.

For marketers, the Brave ad platform offers a technically distinct option: targeting based solely on query and country, with no behavioral data, no third-party cookies, and no ad ID tracking. That positions it differently from the programmatic ecosystem that processes behavioral signals across millions of publisher pages. Whether that distinction translates to campaign performance depends on objectives - brand awareness in a privacy-first context differs structurally from behavioral retargeting.

For publishers, the calculus is starker. Brave's 109 million monthly users represent a portion of the internet that visits publisher websites without generating ad revenue, without appearing in analytics, and without contributing to the measurement data that determines what content gets produced. The broader dark traffic research suggests this population is larger still - close to 1 billion across all blocking mechanisms. At a time when AI is reducing organic search traffic, that invisible audience represents a compounding financial pressure.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Brave Software, operator of the Brave privacy-focused browser, through its Chief of Ads Jean-Paul Schmetz - also CEO of Ghostery - speaking to AdExchanger. The conversation entered marketing circles via Dustin Cha, Co-CEO of Ad-Shield, and sparked debate involving advertising executives and publishers.

What: Brave, originally an ad-blocking browser, has built a functioning advertising business encompassing search ads, new tab takeover display ads, and opt-in notification ads - while continuing to block conventional publisher advertising. The company grew from 80 million to 109 million monthly active users between January 2025 and February 2026. Schmetz outlined the targeting model (query and country only, no behavioral data), explained Brave's position on Google antitrust remedies, and addressed the role of advertising in sustaining AI platforms.

When: The AdExchanger Q&A was published on March 24, 2026. The LinkedIn discussion followed the same day. Brave's ad products have been introduced incrementally since 2019, with Search Ads exiting beta in May 2024.

Where: The Q&A was published by AdExchanger. The LinkedIn debate occurred on Dustin Cha's profile. Brave Search Ads are available in managed service format in the US, Canada, UK, France, and Germany. Brave operates globally across desktop and mobile platforms.

Why: The coverage matters because Brave's model concentrates attention on a structural question that digital advertising has largely deferred: the legitimacy of a browser monetizing users on publisher websites while blocking publisher revenue. With dark traffic approaching 1 billion users and AI reducing organic search traffic simultaneously, the financial pressure on open-web publishers is compounding. Brave's 109 million users represent part of that pressure - and a commercial advertising platform that publishers cannot access.

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