Brave bucks decline in search with privacy first focus

Tech giant Brave has bucked the wider market trends in search by achieving major growth in its search marketing and advertising business, suggesting that its privacy first approach is gaining traction.

While traditional search platforms have faced broader macroeconomic pressures and shifting user habits, Brave has tapped into its growing user base to post record-breaking advertising financial metrics.

Brave’s user numbers rose from 101 million in October 2025 to more than 130 million in October 2026, an increase of 29%. Search volumes have grown faster still, rising 56% year on year from 1.73 billion queries in October 2025 to 2.7 billion in October 2026.

Meanwhile, advertising revenue has grown by 2.85x year on year.

Brave has also added retail clients in Germany, France and the US, expanded its client base and product scope in travel, and signed new banking and lending clients in the UK, US and Germany.

The company has also begun working with IWG, the world’s largest flexible workspace provider and owner of the Regus brand. IWG is using Brave to reach additional, high-intent demand beyond the major search platforms, with performance significantly outperforming its established search channels.

In addition, the company has also broadened its search advertising offer. 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.

It is claimed the expansion gives advertisers another way to reach consumers through Brave Search, while enabling users to discover products directly within search results.

Brave also launched Ask Brave in early 2026, an AI-powered answer engine that combines information from across the web to deliver concise responses alongside organic and sponsored results. More than 50 million queries are answered through Brave Search each day, with around a third triggering an AI-generated summary.

Brave has also continued to develop its AI tools for developers and browser users. Its Leo assistant, built into the Brave Browser, can summarise and analyse webpages and documents, including PDFs and spreadsheets, translate content and help users create new material.

In February, Brave introduced a revamped Search API for developers building AI applications. The release added improved search capabilities, expanded developer tools and new pricing plans.

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.

Brave EMEA regional vice-president of sales Andy Squire said: “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.”

Brave board observer and chief of advertising Jean-Paul Schmetz added: “We have heard a lot about search being dead during 2026, but our numbers tell a different story.

“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.

“The growth we’re seeing, alongside adoption by major search advertisers such as Amazon, Booking.com and, MoneySuperMarket gives us a strong foundation for 2027.”

Brave bucks decline in search with privacy first focus

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