How to show up in Brave Search AI

What are the key facts about Brave Search AI?

What are Brave's AI answers called?

Brave has two AI answer features, and both cite their sources.

• AI Answers is the short summary that appears on top of normal results. It started as "Summarizer" in 2023 and became "Answer with AI" in April 2024. Brave says it gives "a concise summary answer along with references to sources to back up the key claims." Brave Search Help
• Ask Brave launched in September 2025 at search.brave.com/ask. It gives longer answers, takes follow-up questions and has a deep research mode. It works in any browser, not only Brave's. Brave

Brave's own wording on citations: "we always show you where the information comes from." Brave Search Help

Why does Brave matter if few of my customers use it?

Because Brave's index reaches far beyond Brave. Brave sells access to it through the Brave Search API, and in February 2026 it said the API "now supplies most of the top-10 LLMs with real-time Web search data." It added that for some of them, Brave is the only index behind their AI answers. Brave

Brave names some API customers on its own site, including Mistral AI, Cohere, You.com, Together.ai and Kagi. Brave In March 2025, Simon Willison reported that Anthropic listed Brave Search as a subprocessor, and that Claude's search results matched Brave's. Simon Willison Anthropic hasn't announced this itself.

So a page that Brave can't find may also be missing when other AI assistants search the web. Being in Brave's index is a cheap way to show up in many of them at once.

Does Brave have its own crawler user agent?

No. Brave's crawler "does not advertise a differentiated user agent because we must avoid discrimination from websites that allow only Google to crawl them." Brave Search Help

Instead it copies Google's permissions: "if a domain or page is not crawlable by Googlebot, then Brave Search's bot will not crawl it either." That has two practical effects:

• You can't allow or block Brave on its own in robots.txt. Some bot lists mention a "Bravebot" token, but Brave's own help page doesn't. Don't rely on it.
• Your Googlebot rules decide Brave too. If you block Googlebot from a folder, Brave skips it. If Googlebot can reach your service pages, Brave can.

Brave also learns which pages exist from the Web Discovery Project, an opt-in program in the Brave browser. A page is only sent to Brave if it is "visited independently by a large number of people." Brave Pages that real people visit are easier for Brave to find.

How do I get a page into Brave, or out of it?

Brave has no Search Console. It has a short list of tools on its crawler help page: Brave Search Help

1. To add or refresh a page, submit the URL at search.brave.com/submit-url.
2. To remove a live page, add a noindex robots meta tag, then submit the URL so Brave fetches it again. Brave says "robots.txt is not used to prevent a page from being indexed."
3. To remove a page that no longer exists, submit it through the same form or email not-found@brave.com.

The robots.txt point trips people up. Blocking a page in robots.txt stops Brave reading it, but the URL can stay in the index. Use noindex when you want it gone.

How do I get cited in Brave's AI answers?

Brave hasn't published ranking factors for its AI answers. The clearest hint on record is from Brave's head of search, Josep M. Pujol, in 2024: "we pay special attention to schema.org structured data when building the context of the LLM prompt." Search Engine Journal

Beyond that, these habits help with Brave and every assistant that searches its index:

1. Answer first. Put the direct answer in the first sentence under each heading. Answer engines lift short passages, not whole pages.
2. Make facts stand alone. "We repair commercial walk-in coolers in Tampa and St. Petersburg" still makes sense when quoted without the rest of the page.
3. Add accurate structured data. Organization, LocalBusiness, Product and FAQ markup that matches what the page says. Wrong markup is worse than none.
4. Keep text in the HTML. Content that only appears after JavaScript runs is harder for any crawler to read.
5. Date what changes. Prices, hours and offers should say when they were last checked.
6. Keep one set of facts. Your site, listings and profiles should agree on your name, address, services and prices.

What should be on my Brave checklist?

How do I check whether Brave cites me?

Search your customers' questions at search.brave.com and at search.brave.com/ask, and open the sources under each answer. Note whether it links your site, a directory, or a competitor. A plain Brave search for your business name also shows whether your main pages are in the index at all.

Because other AI apps search Brave's index, a gap there often shows up elsewhere too. Our Prompt Simulator runs one question across 12 engines at once and highlights where you're cited. How to track AI search traffic covers the analytics side.

Sources

1. AI in Brave Search — Brave Search Help. Read Sep 30, 2026.
2. Brave Search Crawler — Brave Search Help. Read Sep 30, 2026.
3. Introducing Ask Brave — Brave. Read Sep 30, 2026.
4. The Brave Search API shows exponential growth, emerging as the best search tool to power AI apps — Brave. Read Sep 30, 2026.
5. Brave Search API — Brave. Read Sep 30, 2026.
6. Privacy-preserving Brave Search replaces Google as the default search engine in the Brave browser — Brave. Read Sep 30, 2026.
7. Brave Search — Brave. Read Sep 30, 2026.
8. Brave Announces AI Search Engine - Shares Insights For SEO — Search Engine Journal. Read Sep 30, 2026.
9. Anthropic Trust Center: Brave Search added as a subprocessor — Simon Willison. Read Sep 30, 2026.