Brave Software Inc., the company behind the privacy-first browser and search engine, has introduced Ask Brave — a new feature that blends AI-powered chat with traditional search results in one seamless experience.
The tool is free to use on any browser via search.brave.com/ask, which is designed to save users from switching between traditional search engines with “ten blue links” and AI chatbots that deliver long walls of text.
“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,” announced the company in a blog post on Monday.
“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.”
Instead, Ask Brave tackles this common frustration by combining both in one interface — offering quick results like usual links, videos, or products, alongside asking follow-up questions in a chat-style format for more detailed answers.
Two Modes For Different Needs
Ask Brave comes with two modes:
- Standard Mode: Provides fast, straightforward answers.
- Deep Research: Runs multiple search rounds of queries across Brave’s massive index of 35 billion web pages to deliver more exhaustive insights.
Brave says this system grounds answers in real web data, lowering the chances of irrelevant or “hallucinated” responses — a problem that continues to trouble other AI tools.
Privacy-first Design
Staying true to Brave’s reputation, Ask Brave is built with strict privacy protections. Chats are encrypted, deleted after 24 hours of inactivity, and never used for AI training. The company also doesn’t log IP addresses, meaning conversations can’t be linked back to individual users. That’s a stark contrast to most competing AI chat and search tools that routinely store and analyze user data.
How To Access Ask Brave
Getting started with Ask Brave is simple. You can try it by:
- Ending your search query with “??” on Brave Search,
- Clicking the new Ask button on the Brave Search homepage, or
- Opening the Ask tab at the top of a results page.
Building On AI Answers
Ask Brave builds on AI Answers, Brave’s AI-powered summarizer launched in 2023, which now generates more than 15 million summaries per day. While AI Answers focuses on quick summaries, Ask Brave is designed for deeper conversations, interactive research, and context-rich results without compromising privacy.
With more than 97 million monthly active users, Brave is betting that Ask Brave will make search faster, more useful, and more private — without forcing users to choose between AI convenience and traditional web results.
