Brave Search Statistics (2026): 128.3M Users, 80M+ Queries a Day

A data roundup of Brave Search’s users, query volume, AI answers, index size and Search API, taken only from primary sources: Brave’s transparency report, its About page, the Brave blog, the Brave Search API site and the Brave Search Help Center.

The Brave browser had 128.3 million monthly active users and 54.6 million daily users on September 30, 2026, and Brave says its search engine now handles 80+ million queries a day (Brave transparency report, About Brave). Pick this page if you need Brave numbers with a Brave page behind each one, or if you’re working out how much Brave matters for AI visibility. Skip it if you want Brave’s share of global search: Brave doesn’t publish one, and we don’t repeat third-party panel estimates. Brave matters more than its consumer share suggests, because the same independent index that serves Brave Search is sold through an API that Brave says supplies most of the top-10 LLMs. If an AI assistant grounds its answers in Brave, your Brave visibility feeds straight into your AI visibility results. Every figure below has a verbatim quote in our ledger.

Key takeaways

• 128.3 million Brave browser monthly active users as of September 30, 2026 (Brave transparency report)
• 80+ million Brave Search queries a day, or 2.4+ billion a month, on Brave’s About page (About Brave)
• 22 million Ask Brave AI answers a day in February 2026 (Brave blog, February 2026)
• 40 billion pages in the Brave Search index, with more than 100 million added or refreshed daily (Brave blog, February 2026)
• Most of the top-10 LLMs get real-time web results from the Brave Search API, per Brave (Brave blog, February 2026)
• 92% of Brave Search results came from Brave’s own index by June 2022, up from 87% at launch (Brave blog, June 2022)
• $5 per 1,000 requests for the Brave Search API Search plan, with free monthly credits (Brave blog, June 2026)

How many people use Brave?

Brave publishes browser users, not Brave Search users. Brave Search is the default engine for most Brave browser users, so the browser count is the closest public proxy for the search audience. The most precise current figure is in Brave’s transparency report, which is dated. The About page carries rounder, undated numbers that trail it.

1. The Brave browser had 128.3 million monthly active users as of September 30, 2026 (Brave transparency report).
2. Brave had 54.6 million daily active users on the same date (Brave transparency report).
3. Brave’s About page lists 120+ million monthly active users and 51 million daily active users (About Brave). The page is undated and lower than the September 2026 report, so treat it as an older snapshot.
4. Brave passed 100 million monthly active users on September 30, 2025, reaching 101 million (Brave blog, October 2025).
5. Brave had 42 million daily active users in September 2025, a DAU-to-MAU ratio of 0.42 (Brave blog, October 2025).
6. Brave added about 2.5 million net new users a month on average over the two years to September 2025 (Brave blog, October 2025).
7. Brave reported 107 million monthly active users in February 2026 (Brave blog, February 2026).
8. Brave Search is the default search engine for most of the Brave browser’s 110 million users, Brave said in April 2026 (Brave blog, April 2026).
9. Brave grew from 24 million monthly users at the end of 2020 to over 50 million at the end of 2021 (Brave blog, January 2022).
10. Brave iOS daily installs in the EU went up 50% once the Digital Markets Act browser choice screen arrived (Brave blog, October 2025).
11. Brave Search averaged under 45 million monthly active recipients in the EU from April 1 to September 30, 2026 (Brave Search Help Center). That keeps it below the EU’s Very Large Online Search Engine threshold.

Source: Brave transparency report and Brave blog posts from January 2022, October 2025, February 2026 and April 2026. DAU/MAU on September 30, 2026 works out to about 0.43 (our calc).

How many searches does Brave Search handle?

Brave reports search volume in several ways: per day, per month, per year, and sometimes across both Brave Search and the API together. The figures below are labelled by what each one covers. Brave Search launched publicly in late June 2021.

12. Brave Search handles 80+ million queries a day, 2.4+ billion a month and 28.9+ billion a year, according to Brave’s About page (About Brave).
13. Place search in Brave Search runs on a service that handles over 2.2 billion queries a month (Brave blog, July 2026).
14. Brave Search and the Brave Search API together handled over 2 billion monthly queries in April 2026 (Brave blog, April 2026).
15. Brave Search handled over 2 billion monthly queries in February 2026 (Brave blog, February 2026).
16. Brave Search served more than 1.6 billion queries a month in September 2025, nearly 20 billion a year (Brave blog, October 2025).
17. Brave Search answered more than 50 million queries a day in September 2025 (Brave blog, October 2025).
18. About 8% of Brave Search daily queries come from other browsers, most notably Chrome (Brave blog, October 2025).
19. Brave Search had over 1.5 billion monthly queries when Ask Brave launched in September 2025 (Brave blog, September 2025). Brave called itself the third-largest global independent search engine in the same post.
20. Brave Search handled more than 50 million searches a day in October 2025, with 95% of requests returned in under a second (Brave Search API guide).
21. Brave Search served 27 million queries a day in April 2024, which Brave called the fastest growth of any search engine since Bing (Brave blog, April 2024).
22. Brave Search received almost 10 billion queries a year in April 2024 (Brave blog, April 2024).
23. Brave Search handled 2.5 billion queries in its first 365 days (Brave blog, June 2022).
24. Brave Search peaked at 14.1 million queries in a single day during its first year (Brave blog, June 2022).
25. Brave says Google took more than a year and DuckDuckGo more than 4 years to reach 2.5 billion queries (Brave blog, June 2022).
26. Brave Search went from 0 to 190 million queries a month in under six months of 2021, or 2.3 billion annualized (Brave blog, January 2022).

Source: Brave blog posts from January 2022, June 2022, April 2024, October 2025 and February 2026, and the About Brave page. The About page is undated; we list it last because it carries the highest figures.

How big is AI in Brave Search?

Brave runs two AI answer products on top of its index. AI Answers (first launched as Summarizer, then Answer with AI) gives a short cited answer on the results page. Ask Brave gives longer, chat-style answers with follow-ups. Brave’s own help page says the AI is built in-house on its own models plus open-source LLMs.

27. Brave’s AI summarizer answers a quarter of all daily queries, about 20 million a day, per the About page (About Brave).
28. Ask Brave served 22 million answers a day in February 2026, which Brave calls the largest private user-facing AI app in the world (Brave blog, February 2026).
29. AI Answers served over 15 million answers a day when Ask Brave launched in September 2025 (Brave blog, September 2025).
30. Brave Search served over 15 million AI-generated answers a day in September 2025 (Brave blog, October 2025).
31. Brave released its first AI summaries, called Summarizer, in March 2023 (Brave blog, September 2025).
32. Brave estimated in April 2024 that between a quarter and a third of all queries suit an AI answer (Brave blog, April 2024).
33. Brave’s grounding scores 94.9% on the SimpleQA factual accuracy benchmark, per Brave (Brave blog, September 2025).
34. Ask Brave chats are encrypted and expire by default after 24 hours of inactivity (Brave blog, September 2025).
35. In Brave’s own FreshQA runs, Brave scored 85.3% accuracy at $18 per 1,000 questions, against $49 to $89 for competitors (Brave Search API). This is Brave’s test, not an independent one.

Source: Brave blog posts from September 2025 and February 2026, and the About Brave page.

How big is the Brave Search index?

Brave is one of very few companies outside Google and Microsoft that crawls and ranks the web itself. Index counts have moved quickly, and two 2025 posts disagree slightly (35+ billion in September, over 30 billion in an October guide), so we show each figure with its date.

36. The Brave Search index covers 40 billion pages, with more than 100 million pages added or refreshed every day (Brave blog, February 2026).
37. Brave’s index held 35+ billion webpages in September 2025 (Brave blog, September 2025).
38. Brave’s API guide put the index at over 30 billion pages in October 2025 (Brave Search API guide).
39. The Brave index held 20 billion pages in April 2024 (Brave blog, April 2024).
40. The index held more than 1 billion location-based schemas in April 2024, covering 100 million+ businesses and other points of interest (Brave blog, April 2024).
41. Brave’s Place Search draws on about 200 million points of interest worldwide (Brave blog, July 2026).
42. Brave calls itself one of just three web search indexes at scale in the West, and the only one sold through an independent API (Brave blog, February 2026).
43. Brave says its index is the only one built from signals of 130+ million real people (Brave Search API).
44. 92% of Brave Search results came from Brave’s own index by June 2022, up from 87% at launch (Brave blog, June 2022). The rest came from optional anonymous Google fallback mixing.

Source: Brave blog posts from April 2024, September 2025 and February 2026.

How do I get my site into Brave Search?

These come from Brave’s Help Center. They matter for AI visibility because the Brave crawler fills the same index the API sells to AI companies.

45. Brave’s crawler uses no separate user agent, and it won’t crawl a page that Googlebot can’t crawl (Brave Search Help Center). Blocking Googlebot in robots.txt therefore blocks Brave too.
46. Brave Search doesn’t use robots.txt to keep pages out of the index; a noindex directive delists a page (Brave Search Help Center).

How big is the Brave Search API?

The Brave Search API is where Brave meets AI search. After Microsoft retired the Bing Search API in August 2025 and with Google’s Custom Search JSON API closing, Brave pitches itself as the main independent web index that AI builders can license.

47. Brave’s Search API serves hundreds of millions of queries a day, and its users include a top-3 foundation model (Brave Search API).
48. The Brave Search API page lists 1 million+ OpenClaw and Hermes sign-ups and 150 billion total queries answered (Brave Search API).
49. Nearly 700,000 OpenClaw users had signed up for the Brave Search API by April 2026 (Brave blog, April 2026).
50. The Brave Search API supplies most of the top-10 LLMs with real-time web data, and for some it is the only index behind their AI answers (Brave blog, February 2026).
51. Thousands of new users sign up for the API every day, and it handles billions of API calls a week (Brave blog, February 2026).
52. The API runs at 99.99% uptime (Brave blog, February 2026).
53. The Search plan costs $5 CPM, or $0.005 per request, with $5 in free monthly credits (Brave blog, June 2026).
54. Brave’s API page now offers up to $20 in free calls every month on prepaid credits (Brave Search API).
55. Paid API plans started at $3 CPM in October 2025, when Brave listed Exa from $2.5, Tavily from $8 and Google from $5 CPM (Brave Search API guide).
56. Brave’s Place Search API costs a flat $5 per 1,000 requests, against $32 to $35 for Google Maps (Brave blog, July 2026). Brave puts that at 6 to 7 times cheaper.
57. In Brave’s 1,000-query test, Place Search scored 6.4 against Google Maps’ 7.3 out of 10 on overall quality (Brave blog, July 2026).
58. Brave’s LLM Context API responds in under 500ms at P90 and cuts token use by up to 4x (Brave Search API).
59. Google’s Custom Search JSON API shuts down on January 1, 2027 (Brave Search API).
60. Bing retired its search API in August 2025, after announcing the change in May 2025 (Brave Search API guide).
61. More than 700 engineers registered for an AlphaSignal hackathon built on the Brave Search API in August 2026 (Brave blog, September 2026).

Source: Brave Search API guide, Brave blog, June 2026 and the Brave Search API page, fetched November 3, 2026.

What about Brave ads?

62. Brave Ads campaigns averaged an 8% click-through rate in 2021, against an industry average of 2%, per Brave (Brave blog, January 2022). Brave hasn’t published a newer average.
63. Brave Search supports more than 40 languages (About Brave).

What to do with this data

• Treat Brave as AI infrastructure. Brave says its API supplies most of the top-10 LLMs. If an assistant grounds answers in Brave, a page missing from Brave’s index can’t be cited from that source.
• Check you’re in the Brave index. Search your brand and key pages on Brave Search. Brave’s crawler follows Googlebot permissions, so a page blocked to Googlebot is blocked to Brave too.
• Don’t rely on robots.txt to keep pages out. Brave uses noindex for delisting.
• Track answers, not just rankings. Mentionova tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Reddit from $99/mo on annual billing, and our AI visibility tools and LLM brand monitoring tools rankings compare the alternatives.
• Watch the API price war. With Bing’s API retired and Google’s closing, AI builders are moving to Brave and others, which makes Brave’s index matter more each year.

For the wider picture, see our Bing statistics, Google search statistics, AI search statistics, Perplexity statistics, AI crawler statistics and GEO statistics.

Definitions

• MAU / DAU: monthly and daily active users of the Brave browser, as counted by Brave.
• Brave Search: Brave’s search engine, built on its own index. It is the default in most Brave browsers and is also usable from other browsers.
• AI Answers: Brave’s short, cited AI summary on the results page, first released as Summarizer in March 2023.
• Ask Brave: Brave’s longer chat-style AI answer mode, launched in September 2025.
• Brave Search API: paid access to Brave’s index for developers and AI companies, priced per 1,000 requests (CPM).
• Independence score: the share of results Brave served from its own index rather than from Google fallback mixing.
• Google fallback mixing: an optional, anonymous check of Google for queries where Brave lacks enough results.
• Monthly active recipients: the EU Digital Services Act user measure, averaged over six months.

Frequently asked questions

How many people use Brave Search?

Brave doesn’t publish a separate Brave Search user count. The Brave browser, where Brave Search is usually the default, had 128.3 million monthly and 54.6 million daily active users on September 30, 2026.

How many searches does Brave Search get per day?

Brave’s About page says 80+ million queries a day and 2.4+ billion a month. In September 2025 Brave reported more than 50 million a day.

What is Brave Search’s market share?

Brave doesn’t publish a share of global search. It reported under 45 million average monthly EU recipients for April to September 2026, below the EU’s 45 million threshold for very large search engines.

Does Brave Search use Google or Bing?

No. Brave runs its own index of about 40 billion pages. An optional, anonymous Google fallback exists for thin results; 92% of results came from Brave’s own index by June 2022.

Which AI tools use Brave Search?

Brave says its Search API supplies most of the top-10 LLMs and a top-3 foundation model, without naming most of them. It also powers agent tools such as OpenClaw, with 1 million+ sign-ups.

How many AI answers does Brave give?

Ask Brave served 22 million answers a day in February 2026. The About page says AI summaries cover about a quarter of daily queries, about 20 million a day.

How much does the Brave Search API cost?

The Search plan is $5 per 1,000 requests ($0.005 each). Brave’s API page currently offers up to $20 in free calls a month on prepaid credits.

How big is Brave’s index?

Brave reported 40 billion pages in February 2026, up from 20 billion in April 2024, and adds or refreshes more than 100 million pages a day.

How do I get my site indexed by Brave?

Make sure Googlebot can crawl it, because Brave’s crawler follows the same permissions. Use noindex, not robots.txt, to keep a page out.

Does Brave Search matter for GEO?

Yes, if the AI assistants your buyers use ground answers in Brave. Brave says most top-10 LLMs use its API, so being indexed and well described in Brave feeds AI citations.

How we compiled these statistics

We fetched 17 primary source pages from brave.com and search.brave.com on November 3, 2026 and recorded 64 data points in docs/content/stats-ledgers/brave-search-statistics.json. Every numbered figure above maps to a ledger row with a verbatim quote from the page we fetched. User counts come from Brave’s transparency report, its About page and the Brave blog; query, AI answer and index figures come from the Brave blog and the Brave Search API site; crawler and EU figures come from the Brave Search Help Center. These are all Brave’s own figures, and we label tests Brave ran itself. We left out third-party share estimates and figures we couldn’t trace to a Brave page. Values marked “our calc” are arithmetic on Brave’s numbers.

Sources

• Brave: Transparency report
• Brave: About Brave
• Brave blog: Brave browser passes 100 million monthly active users (October 2025)
• Brave blog: Brave and Snowflake (February 2026)
• Brave blog: Brave Search API growth (February 2026)
• Brave blog: OpenClaw and the Brave Search API (April 2026)
• Brave blog: Place search improved (July 2026)
• Brave blog: Claude Cowork on Amazon Bedrock with Brave Search (June 2026)
• Brave blog: AlphaSignal hackathon (September 2026)
• Brave blog: Introducing Ask Brave (September 2025)
• Brave blog: Answer with AI (April 2024)
• Brave blog: Brave Search passes 2.5 billion queries (June 2022)
• Brave blog: 2021 recap (January 2022)
• Brave Search API
• Brave Search API guide: What sets the Brave Search API apart (October 2025)
• Brave Search Help Center: Brave Search crawler
• Brave Search Help Center: EU Digital Services Act