Introducing Ask Brave
Today we’re launching Ask Brave, a single interface that consolidates search and AI chat. Ask Brave is available on the Brave Search homepage and at the top of the Brave Search results page. It’s free and available on any browser or platform.
With Ask Brave, users no longer have to choose between different tools depending on the action they want to perform, juggling between traditional search engines with their ten blue links, and chat-like interfaces with their walls of text. Brave solves this problem by offering a system that combines the best of both approaches, eliminating the unnecessary back-and-forth between different platforms and cumbersome copy-pasting. Ask Brave provides comprehensive answers to any question, plus all the additional actionable elements–such as videos, webpages, and products–at the click (or tap) of a button.
The best of both worlds: chat and search
AI answers are not new in Brave Search—we released the first version of this feature in March 2023 (known as “Summarizer”). Today’s version—AI Answers (originally Answer with AI)—serves over 15 million answers per day, making it one of the most widely used AI products in the market. Ask Brave is the next iteration of this experience, combining the best of both worlds: the simplicity and direct action of the conventional Brave Search engine, and the convenience and time-saving benefits of LLM-generated responses. Ask Brave is available in addition to AI Answers, which are meant to provide users with quick answers, while Ask Brave gives users more extensive results. Users can easily follow up with more queries in chat fashion, thus combining search and chat.
The answers provided by Ask Brave are always grounded in information found on the Web, meaning that the AI is less likely to hallucinate or provide irrelevant information. As a search engine, we ensure the AI limits itself to search results that are relevant to your question.
You can type simple search queries or ask nuanced, detailed questions. Ask Brave will determine which level of resolution best suits your needs and offer you both an answer and follow-up actions typically associated with that answer. Here are just a few examples of what Ask Brave can do:
Following Brave’s commitment to users’ privacy, your questions and conversations are never used for training in any capacity. Chats are encrypted, ephemeral and expire by default after 24 hours of inactivity. We don’t retain IP addresses. For more information, see here.
“Brave Search was the first search engine to offer free and public access to AI summaries in 2023, and today we generate more than 15 million AI-powered answers daily with our AI Answers feature. Seeing the engagement of our users with this feature and how much appetite they have for the convenience offered by AI integrated into a search engine, it was a natural step to launch Ask Brave as the evolution of AI Answers,” said Josep M. Pujol, Chief of Search at Brave. “While AI Answers give our users quick summaries, Ask Brave provides longer answers, follow-ups, and a chat mode enhanced with Deep Research, and most importantly, contextually relevant enrichments such as videos, news articles, products, businesses, shopping, and more - in the right place, at the right time. Search makes it possible, LLMs glue it together. We anticipate that Ask Brave will generate millions more daily AI-powered answers with this powerful combination of search and chat, and look forward to deploying more useful AI-powered search tools for our users.”
Using Deep Research when thoroughness is more important than speed
While Brave’s standard search already delivers reliable, comprehensive results for most queries, sometimes a user may want to run longer research sessions on a topic and focus on getting a comprehensive, exhaustive overview.
Ask Brave is built on Brave’s recent grounding technology for the Search API, which achieves state-of-the-art scoring on factual accuracy benchmarks (94.9% accuracy on SimpleQA). This Deep Research technique leverages multiple rounds of Brave’s proven search against our junk-free index of 35+ billion webpages. The system has been designed to iteratively cover blindspots, issuing dozens of queries and analyzing thousands of pages so users receive the most thorough and well-informed responses available.
How to try Ask Brave
All AI features in Brave Search are designed with a “when you need them” philosophy. LLMs come in handy, but can also be wasteful and distracting. Here are the ways you can easily try Ask Brave:
Method 1: If Brave Search is your default search engine, you can ask a question directly in your browser—ending that query with a double question mark “??” will direct the query to Ask Brave.
Method 2: Click the “Ask” button on search.brave.com (next to the magnifying glass “Search” button)
Method 3: Click the “Ask” tab on the search results page (SERP) to expand the normal search into a chat search.
You can also set your homepage to https://search.brave.com/ask.
About Brave and Brave Search
Brave is a privacy-preserving Web browser with over 97 million monthly active users worldwide. Brave Search is the default search engine in Brave, and is also available in any browser at https://search.brave.com. Brave Search is the third-largest global independent search engine, with an index of over 35 billion webpages and a volume of over 1.5 billion monthly queries.
Brave Search also offers a Search API that helps organizations supply their AI LLMs with real-time data, power agentic search, train foundation models, and create search-enabled software. The Brave Search API is for building applications that benefit from having access to the Web, going beyond the static knowledge of AI models, and is currently the single source of real-time data for some of the biggest AI LLMs.
Note: With this update, we’ve simplified the name of an earlier AI feature: Answer with AI is now AI Answers. All AI features in Brave Search are optional and can be turned off via the settings menu.
