Brave user numbers rise 29% as search volumes jump 56%
Brave Browser & Search Engine has reported strong growth in users and search activity in 2026, alongside new client wins across retail, travel and finance. The company has also expanded its advertising offering to allow clients to enhance their paid search listings with retail product data, while developing its AI-powered search and browsing tools.
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 grew faster still, rising 56% year on year from 1.73 billion queries in October 2025 to 2.7 billion in October 2026. On 31 August, Brave recorded 85.5 million queries in a single day. Advertising revenue has grown by 2.85x year on year.
“2026 has been a year of sustained, substantial growth for Brave,” said Andy Squire, RVP Sales EMEA. “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 has 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.
Also Read: Attentive's New CEO Eric Miao Sets New Vision to Transform How Brands Market to Consumers
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.
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.
The expansion gives advertisers another way to reach consumers through Brave Search, while enabling users to discover products directly within search results.
Brave 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.
Ask Brave cites the sources used in its answers and is designed to operate without user profiling. Queries and responses are encrypted, are not used to train AI models, and are automatically deleted after 24 hours of inactivity.
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.
“We have heard a lot about search being dead during 2026, but our numbers tell a different story,” said Jean-Paul Schmetz, Board Observer and Chief of Ads at Brave. “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. We’ll continue to develop our offering around what users and advertisers need.”
About Brave Browser & Search Engine
Brave is helping brands and agencies navigate the future of digital advertising in a privacy-first world. It is redefining how advertisers connect with audiences through a browser and search engine built on transparency, user control, and performance.
The Brave browser is used by 128.3 million people worldwide. It blocks third-party ads and trackers by default for fast, private browsing. It also offers a wealth of helpful features including a VPN and an AI browsing assistant. Brave is 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. It provides users with accurate, AI-enhanced answers without profiling them. Brave Search is available as the default search engine in Brave, or via any other browser at search.brave.com.
Brave is also reinventing digital advertising, with paid search currently prioritising a single advertiser on the page, and the New Tab Takeover - a high-impact ad unit that offers a near-full-screen takeover of the new tab page on the Brave browser. Ads are served on the first new tab upon starting the browser, and on every third new tab thereafter. With these placements, advertisers get access to engaged, otherwise unreachable audiences.
