Brave to Introduce AI Search Feature "Ask Brave"
The team behind the privacy-focused Brave browser and search engine has announced a new feature called Ask Brave, which integrates search and AI chat into a single interface.
The feature is free to use, available from any browser at search.brave.com/ask, and was built with privacy at its core. It merges traditional search results with AI-generated answers, presenting responses to queries in a conversational format.
Ask Brave does not replace AI Answers—Brave Search’s AI summarizer launched in 2023. That system, which the company says generates more than 15 million answers daily, will continue to operate separately. However, Brave argues that AI Answers alone cannot close the gap between standard search results and large language model (LLM) responses. Ask Brave is designed to bridge that gap.
“With Ask Brave, users no longer have to choose between different tools depending on the action they want to perform—switching between traditional search engines with their ten blue links and chat interfaces with their walls of text,” the company said in its announcement. “Brave solves this problem by offering a system that combines the best of both approaches, eliminating the need to switch between platforms or copy and paste between them.”
How to Use Ask Brave
Users can access the feature by:
- Ending a search query with a double question mark (
??) in Brave Search. - Clicking the Ask button on search.brave.com.
- Selecting the Ask tab on the search results page.
Modes of Operation
Ask Brave runs in two modes:
- Standard mode, for quick responses.
- In-depth mode, which performs multiple search cycles to reduce missed details and deliver more comprehensive answers.
According to Brave, the system pulls information directly from the web and is less likely to hallucinate or produce irrelevant responses compared to typical AI models.
Privacy Protections
Brave emphasizes that all conversations with Ask Brave are encrypted, are not used for AI training, and are automatically deleted after 24 hours of inactivity. In addition, Brave Search does not log IP addresses, preventing conversations from being linked to specific individuals.
