Brave Search Review: The Independent Search Engine That Actually Works

Google controls over 90% of search. Let that sink in. One company decides what billions of people see when they look for information. Bing exists, sure, but it's a rounding error. DuckDuckGo sounds independent until you learn it's mostly Bing results with a privacy wrapper. For years, building a truly independent search index seemed impossible — the cost and scale required were simply too massive.

Then Brave Search showed up and actually did it.

What Brave Search Actually Is

Brave Search isn't another meta-search engine repackaging someone else's results. It runs on its own independent index — built from scratch. That's the critical difference. When you search on Brave, you're querying Brave's own crawled and indexed version of the web, not a filtered view of Google or Bing.

Brave acquired Tailcat in 2021, an open search engine built by the team behind Cliqz, and used it as the foundation. Since then, they've grown the index to cover billions of pages. The search engine launched publicly in 2022, and by 2024 it was handling over 20 million queries per day.

The results are genuinely different from Google's. Search for anything remotely commercial on Google and you'll wade through ads, AI overviews, shopping carousels, and sponsored placements before finding an actual organic result. Brave Search shows you... search results. Clean, ranked, relevant results. It's refreshing in a way that makes you realize how far Google has drifted from its original purpose.

The Web Discovery Project: Crowdsourced Indexing

Here's where things get genuinely interesting. Building a search index is expensive. Google spends billions on crawling infrastructure. Brave's solution? Crowdsource it.

The Web Discovery Project (WDP) is an opt-in feature in the Brave browser that lets users anonymously contribute data about the web pages they visit. When you opt in, your browser sends anonymized information about pages you visit — URLs, page content, and how you interact with search results — to help Brave build and refine its index.

The privacy guarantees are serious. Brave uses a system of unlinkable tokens and data stripping to ensure that contributions can't be traced back to individual users. There's no user profiling, no tracking, no way for Brave to reconstruct your browsing history. The data is aggregated and anonymized before it ever reaches Brave's servers. You can review exactly what's being sent and opt out at any time.

This is fundamentally different from how Google builds its index. Google crawls the web with Googlebot and uses your search behavior (clicks, dwell time, bounce rates) to refine rankings — all tied to your profile. Brave gets similar signals without knowing who you are.

The Web Discovery Project means Brave's index improves as more people use it. It's a genuine network effect that doesn't require surveillance. Every Brave user who opts in is essentially voting on what the web looks like, helping surface pages that real humans actually find useful.

Why This Matters for the Open Web

Google's search monopoly isn't just a business problem — it's an information problem. When one company controls what people find online, they control what gets seen. Google's algorithm changes have decimated entire categories of websites. Independent publishers, small blogs, niche forums — many have been pushed out of results in favor of Reddit threads, big media sites, and Google's own properties.

Brave Search represents something rare: a credible alternative with genuine independence. It doesn't license results from Google. It doesn't depend on Bing's API. It has its own crawler (BraveBot), its own index, and its own ranking algorithms.

This matters for website owners too. If Google is your only source of search traffic, you're at the mercy of every algorithm update. Having a real second search engine that drives meaningful traffic gives publishers leverage and reduces dependency on a single gatekeeper.

The EU's Digital Markets Act is pushing for more search competition in Europe, and Brave is positioning itself as the primary alternative. But this isn't just a regulatory play — it's a genuine product that's earning users through quality.

Getting Your Site Indexed by Brave Search

If you run a website, you should be paying attention to Brave Search. Here's how to make sure your site gets indexed properly.

Let BraveBot crawl your site. Check your robots.txt and make sure you're not blocking BraveBot. It respects robots.txt directives, so if you've got a blanket block on unknown crawlers, BraveBot won't index you. Add an explicit allow:

User-agent: BraveBot
Allow: /

Submit your sitemap. Brave has a Web Discovery submission at search.brave.com/webmasters. Submit your XML sitemap to help BraveBot discover your pages faster. This is especially important for new sites that don't have many inbound links yet.

Use IndexNow. Brave Search uses Bing's supplemental results for queries where its own index is thin. Since Bing supports IndexNow — an open protocol that lets you ping search engines when content changes — submitting through IndexNow helps your content appear in both Bing and, by extension, Brave's supplemental results. It's a two-for-one.

Standard SEO still applies. Clean HTML, proper meta tags, fast load times, mobile-friendly design — all the fundamentals matter. Brave's ranking algorithm is different from Google's, but good web practices are universal.

At AgentRank, we went through this process ourselves when setting up our indexing. Adding BraveBot to our robots.txt, submitting our sitemap, and implementing IndexNow took about 20 minutes total. Within a week, our pages were showing up in Brave Search results. It's not complicated — the hard part is just knowing to do it.

Honest Pros and Cons

I'm not going to pretend Brave Search is perfect. Here's the honest breakdown.

What Brave Search Does Well

Clean results. No AI overviews eating half the page. No shopping carousels for every query. Just search results. It's what Google used to feel like.

Real privacy. Not "we anonymize your data" privacy — actual structural privacy. No tracking, no profiling, no ad targeting based on your searches. Brave's business model for search uses privacy-preserving ads that don't require user profiles.

Independent index. This can't be overstated. Having a search engine that doesn't depend on Google or Bing for its core results is vital for the health of the web.

Speed. Results load fast. The interface is minimal and focused. There's no bloat.

Goggles. Brave's Goggles feature lets anyone create custom re-ranking rules. Want search results that prioritize small independent blogs over big media? Someone's built a Goggle for that. It's like having community-curated search filters.

Where Brave Search Falls Short

Index depth. For obscure or very specific queries, Brave's index is still thinner than Google's. You'll occasionally get results that feel incomplete, especially for niche technical topics or very recent content. Brave falls back on Bing's API for these gaps, which helps but isn't ideal.

Local search. Google Maps integration makes local business searches hard to beat. Brave's local results exist but are noticeably weaker. If you're looking for "best Thai food near me," Google still wins.

Image and video search. Functional but not as comprehensive. Google's media search is years ahead.

Market share reality. Brave Search is growing, but it's still small. That means less community content about optimizing for it, fewer webmaster tools, and less data about how its ranking works.

Learning curve. Some people try Brave Search, get one mediocre result, and go back to Google. You need to use it for a week or two to appreciate where it shines. It requires a small commitment.

The Bigger Picture

Brave Search isn't trying to be a Google clone. It's building something different — a search engine that respects privacy by design, maintains an independent index through community participation, and gives users actual control over their search experience.

Is it ready to be your only search engine? For most queries, yes. For everything? Not quite yet. I use Brave Search as my default and fall back to Google maybe once or twice a week for very specific lookups. That ratio keeps improving as Brave's index grows.

The Web Discovery Project is what makes me genuinely optimistic. It's a model where the search engine gets better because users participate, not because they're surveilled. Every person who opts in is helping build an alternative to Google's information monopoly.

If you care about the open web — as a user, a developer, or a website owner — Brave Search deserves your attention. Set it as your default for a month. Submit your site to BraveBot. Opt into the Web Discovery Project. These small actions compound into something that matters.

The best time to break a monopoly is before everyone realizes it's a monopoly. With search, we're past that point. The second best time is now.