Brave Sells Its Search Index to AI, and Your Website Is Probably in It

The New York Times sued Brave on Nov. 2, alleging it copied more than 30 billion webpages without identifying its crawler or offering a way to block it, then sold that content to AI companies through its Search API, which Brave says is used by Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity and You.com. Because Brave's crawler does not advertise a differentiated user agent and instead follows Googlebot's rules, site owners cannot block Brave without also blocking Google, and opting out via noindex also removes pages from Google. Brave has not yet responded to the suit.