Brave's search engine handled 2.7 billion queries in October 2026, up 56% from 1.73 billion a year earlier, according to a press release the company issued from London on November 10, 2026. User numbers rose 29% over the same twelve months, from 101 million to more than 130 million, and advertising revenue grew 2.85 times year on year, according to Brave - a multiple published without the amount it multiplies.

The release does more than restate traffic. Brave Search now carries organic and sponsored product listing ads built from merchant data, and the company named new retail, travel and finance clients alongside IWG, the owner of the Regus brand. It also set out the privacy terms of Ask Brave, its AI answer engine, and repeated a claim that has become central to its pitch to developers: that Brave runs one of only three web search indexes at scale in the West.

What the document leaves out is almost as telling. It arrived eight days after The New York Times and three other newspapers sued Brave in Manhattan over Ask Brave, the Search API and the browser's ad blocking. The release does not mention the cases.

In Short

Brave says its search engine processed 2.7 billion queries in October 2026, 56% more than a year earlier, while its user count rose 29% to more than 130 million and its ad revenue grew 2.85 times. Advertisers get a new format, because Brave Search now takes merchant product feeds for organic and sponsored product listing ads, and the company names Amazon, Booking.com, MoneySuperMarket and IWG among the brands buying its search inventory. The growth is clear, but the release gives no revenue base and its own figures disagree in places, so the size of the business in money terms remains undisclosed.

The figures Brave published

The core numbers are year-on-year comparisons for a single month. Brave counted 101 million users in October 2025 and more than 130 million in October 2026. Search volume went from 1.73 billion queries to 2.7 billion over the same period. By PPC Land's calculation, the user increase is 28.7% and the query increase 56.1%, which matches the rounded 29% and 56% in the release.

The release also gives a single-day high. On August 31, 2026, a Monday, Brave Search recorded 85.5 million queries. And it says advertising revenue "has grown by 2.85x year on year", without stating the period covered, the starting amount or whether the figure covers search ads, browser ads or both. Brave is privately held and does not publish financial statements, so the multiple cannot be checked against anything else.

Earlier disclosures fill in the curve. When Brave passed 100 million monthly active users, it put the figure at 101 million on September 30, 2025, with more than 1.6 billion search queries a month. By February 2026 the browser had 109 million monthly users. A LinkedIn post from the company in the summer put July 2026 at 122.55 million monthly users and 2.46 billion queries, the same month Brave Search was added to Chrome's global list of default search engines.

Set against July, the October figures show growth continuing rather than slowing. Queries rose about 9.8% in three months and users about 6.1%, by PPC Land's calculation, with both months having 31 days. Searches are growing faster than users, a pattern the year-on-year figures also show. A rough ratio of monthly queries to users moved from about 17 in October 2025 to about 21 in October 2026. That ratio is imprecise, because Brave Search can also be used from other browsers at search.brave.com, and the release does not say whether its user count means monthly active browser users or something wider.

Where the numbers do not line up

Several figures in the release do not sit comfortably with each other.

The first is the user count. The body of the release says Brave had "more than 130 million" users in October 2026. The "About" section at the bottom of the same document says the browser "is used by 128.3 million people worldwide." Neither figure is dated beyond the month, and the release does not explain the gap.

The second is daily search volume. According to the release, "More than 50 million queries are answered through Brave Search each day." That is the same round number Brave used a year ago, when monthly volume was 1.6 billion. At 2.7 billion queries in October, the daily average works out to roughly 87 million by PPC Land's calculation. A claim of "more than 50 million" is technically consistent with 87 million, but it understates it by more than a third. The release does not say whether the 50 million counts only queries typed into the consumer search engine and the 2.7 billion also includes other traffic, such as Search API calls.

The third is the single-day record. If October averaged about 87 million queries a day, many October days would have exceeded the 85.5 million recorded on August 31. The two numbers only fit if the 2.7 billion is rounded up from roughly 2.65 billion, which would put October's average at about 85.5 million, or if the monthly total counts something the daily record does not. The release does not say whether August 31 still stood as the record at the end of October.

The fourth is a date. The release says "Brave launched Ask Brave in early 2026." Brave in fact announced Ask Brave on September 29, 2025, describing it as a free interface combining search and AI chat, reachable at search.brave.com/ask or by adding "??" to a query in the address bar. The release may be referring to a wider rollout or a later version, but it does not say so.

None of these gaps changes the direction of the story. Brave's search traffic grew substantially in the twelve months to October. They do mean the precise figures are the company's own, unaudited and not fully reconciled.

For performance marketers, the most concrete change is a new ad format. According to the release, "Alongside its existing search term targeting, Brave Search now supports organic and sponsored Product Listing Ads (PLAs). Merchants can enhance their paid search listings with product feeds containing information such as prices, images and specifications."

The format mirrors what shopping advertisers already buy on the largest engines. Product listing ads replace or supplement a text ad with a structured product unit, and they depend on a product feed that carries item-level data such as price and image. Brave says both organic and sponsored versions now exist, meaning products can appear in results without payment as well as in paid placements.

The release says the expansion "gives advertisers another way to reach consumers through Brave Search, while enabling users to discover products directly within search results." It does not say when the format went live, which markets it covers, which feed specification merchants must use, whether existing shopping feeds can be reused, how the units are priced or how many merchants are already running them.

There is also a structural question the document does not answer. According to the release, Brave's paid search currently prioritises "a single advertiser on the page." How a product unit, which typically shows several items from several merchants, fits a model built around one advertiser per results page is not explained.

Brave's search ads business is not new. Brave Search Ads left beta on May 30, 2024, after an 18-month test that included Amazon, Dell and Shutterstock. Amazon appears again in the November 2026 release, named by Brave's ad chief as one of the "major search advertisers" that have adopted the platform.

The browser ad side

The release also describes the New Tab Takeover, which it calls "a high-impact ad unit that offers a near-full-screen takeover of the new tab page on the Brave browser." According to Brave, these ads are served "on the first new tab upon starting the browser, and on every third new tab thereafter." The release pitches the placements as reaching "engaged, otherwise unreachable audiences" - a reference to the fact that the browser blocks third-party ads and trackers by default.

That model has long drawn objections from publishers. Brave blocks ads on other websites and sells its own placements inside the browser, with Brave Ads operating on a 70% revenue share to users who opt into its Rewards program. The release does not break down how much of the 2.85-times revenue growth came from search ads and how much from browser placements such as the New Tab Takeover.

Clients named, and one performance claim

Brave's list of new business is broad and mostly anonymous. According to the release, it added retail clients in Germany, France and the US, "expanded its client base and product scope in travel", and signed banking and lending clients in the UK, the US and Germany. None of those clients is named.

IWG is the exception. The release describes it as "the world's largest flexible workspace provider and owner of the Regus brand," and says it is using Brave "to reach additional, high-intent demand beyond the major search platforms, with performance significantly outperforming its established search channels."

That is a striking claim, and an unsupported one. The statement comes from Brave, not from IWG. No IWG spokesperson is quoted, and the release gives no metric: no cost per acquisition, conversion rate, return on ad spend or volume of leads. It does not say which search channels IWG compared Brave against, or over what period. On a platform far smaller than the largest search engines, a strong efficiency result on modest spend would not be surprising, but the release offers nothing that would let a reader judge it.

The named advertisers also shift within the document. Jean-Paul Schmetz, Brave's board observer and chief of ads, cited Amazon, Booking.com and MoneySuperMarket as major search advertisers that have adopted Brave. IWG, the only client whose results the release describes, does not appear in his quote.

Ask Brave, Leo and the privacy terms

Brave's AI products occupy much of the release. Ask Brave, which the company describes as "an AI-powered answer engine that combines information from across the web to deliver concise responses alongside organic and sponsored results," sits in front of the search ads business, because sponsored results appear next to its answers.

According to the release, around a third of the more than 50 million daily Brave Search queries trigger an AI-generated summary. By PPC Land's calculation, that is roughly 16.7 million AI summaries a day on the release's own base. When Ask Brave was announced, Brave said its AI answers were producing more than 15 million responses each day. If the 50 million base is understated, as the monthly total suggests, the number of AI summaries would be higher too.

The privacy terms are set out plainly. "Ask Brave cites the sources used in its answers and is designed to operate without user profiling," the release states. "Queries and responses are encrypted, are not used to train AI models, and are automatically deleted after 24 hours of inactivity." Those terms match what Brave said at the September 2025 announcement, when it described chats as encrypted, temporary by default and never used for training.

Leo, the AI assistant built into the Brave browser, gets a shorter description. According to Brave, it "can summarise and analyse webpages and documents, including PDFs and spreadsheets, translate content and help users create new material." The release gives no usage figures for Leo.

Andy Squire, Brave's regional vice president of sales for EMEA, tied the growth to privacy. "2026 has been a year of sustained, substantial growth for Brave," he said in the release. "Consumers are looking for more control over their data and their privacy, and are turning to alternatives that offer a faster, safer way to browse and search. That growing audience creates opportunities for advertisers to reach people in a different environment."

The release offers no survey or usage data showing why people switched. Distribution changes over the period could also have played a part. Brave Search gained a place on Chrome's default search engine list in July 2026, and the UK's Competition and Markets Authority is consulting on a choice screen of up to 12 search providers on Android and Chrome, a process in which Brave asked for a fixed annual choice-screen day. Brave does not attribute any of its growth to these channels.

The Search API and the three-index claim

The developer business is where Brave's ambitions reach beyond its own audience. In February 2026, according to the release, Brave "introduced a revamped Search API for developers building AI applications," adding improved search capabilities, expanded developer tools and new pricing plans. Brave's own post on the launch was published on February 12, 2026, and introduced an LLM Context endpoint, with the main Search plan priced at $5 per 1,000 requests.

The release also cites research of its own. "Research published alongside the launch found that less powerful open-weight language models could outperform leading models when supplied with higher-quality data from the Brave Search API," it states. The claim concerns grounding, the practice of feeding a language model live search results so its answers rest on current sources rather than only on training data. The release does not name the models, the benchmark or the size of the gap, and the research was carried out by Brave about its own product. Brave has run similar comparisons before: in a June 2026 test of AI answer engines, Ask Brave placed first in a contest Brave designed and ran, judged by AI models rather than people.

Then there is the index. Brave describes itself as "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." The release does not name the other two, though the obvious candidates are Google and Microsoft's Bing. The second half of the claim has a concrete basis. Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on August 11, 2025, steering developers toward a more expensive grounding service inside Azure AI Agents that returns citations and links rather than raw results. Google has never sold general access to its web index in the same way.

Running an index means crawling and indexing the web independently rather than renting results from someone else. In April 2024, Brave said its index covered more than 20 billion web pages. By the Ask Brave launch in September 2025, the figure cited was more than 35 billion. The November 2026 release gives no index size.

The release names no AI companies as API customers and gives no API query volumes.

What the release does not mention

On November 2, 2026, The New York Times and three other newspapers sued Brave in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The Times filed one complaint. The Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed another. The suits target three of the products the November 10 release promotes.

Ask Brave is accused of reproducing paywalled articles. The Search API, including the LLM Context endpoint, is accused of supplying newspaper content to third parties. And the browser's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own is the basis of an unjust enrichment claim. A separate count under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act concerns a paywall blocker in the browser's filter lists. The complaints cite Brave's own transparency data showing close to 130 million monthly users and more than 50 million daily users as of September 30, 2026.

The release presents source citation, no training on user queries and default ad blocking as features. The newspapers' complaints treat the same products as the problem. The release does not say how, or whether, the litigation might affect the API business or the advertising model it describes. Brave had made no public response on the day the suits were filed.

The "search is dead" argument

Schmetz framed the release as a rebuttal. "We have heard a lot about search being dead during 2026, but our numbers tell a different story," he said. "People still want to find information, compare options and discover products. What's changing is how they want to do it, and the level of privacy and control they expect along the way."

He added that the growth, alongside adoption by major search advertisers, "gives us a strong foundation for 2027," and said Brave would "continue to develop our offering around what users and advertisers need."

Is search dying? The evidence through 2026 has pointed in more than one direction. A Fractl study of more than a million high-volume keywords found that search volume across those terms fell 29% in the year to April 2026, with fintech terms down 37.7%. Yet Alphabet's chief executive Sundar Pichai said in October that Google's year-over-year query growth was the highest in five years, and Google Search and other revenue reached $63.35 billion in the third quarter of 2026, up 12% from a year earlier. Google does not publish query counts, so Brave's 2.7 billion a month cannot be set against a matching Google figure.

What Brave's numbers show is narrower than Schmetz's framing. One privacy-focused engine, starting from a small base, grew its query volume by more than half in a year. That is consistent with search demand shifting between providers and interfaces rather than disappearing. It does not show that the overall market grew, or that users moved to Brave for privacy rather than for any other reason.

For advertisers, the question is inventory. A platform that added close to a billion monthly queries in a year, sells one prominent paid placement per page and now accepts product feeds has more to sell than it did twelve months ago. The figures needed to size it - revenue, cost per click, auction depth, conversion data from named clients - are still not public.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Brave, the privacy-focused browser and search company, through Andy Squire, its regional vice president of sales for EMEA, and Jean-Paul Schmetz, its board observer and chief of ads. Advertisers named include Amazon, Booking.com, MoneySuperMarket and IWG.

What: Brave reported 2.7 billion search queries in October 2026, up 56% from 1.73 billion a year earlier, user numbers up 29% to more than 130 million, and advertising revenue up 2.85 times year on year. It added organic and sponsored product listing ads built from merchant product feeds to Brave Search, named new clients in retail, travel and finance, and restated the privacy terms of Ask Brave. Some of the release's own figures conflict, including two different user counts and a daily query figure that does not match the monthly total.

When: The release is dated November 10, 2026. The comparisons cover October 2025 to October 2026, with a single-day record of 85.5 million queries on August 31, 2026.

Where: The release was issued from London. Client wins span Germany, France, the UK and the US, and Brave Search is available worldwide in the Brave browser and at search.brave.com.

Why: Brave is positioning its search engine as growing inventory for advertisers and its independent index as a data source for AI developers, at a time when the industry is debating whether AI answers are shrinking search. The release arrived eight days after four newspapers sued Brave over the same AI and advertising products, which it does not mention.