Search is in the grip of an unprecedented transformation as shifting human search habits and agentic machine search set about reshaping the structure of the entire ecosystem.
We caught up with Andy Squire, Regional Lead at Brave Search, to discuss browser independence, an industry in flux and the vital importance of search for AI applications.
1. Search is a highly mature market – what gap does Brave fill?
Brave Search fills the market gap for a genuinely independent, privacy-first search engine that doesn’t rely on Google or Microsoft’s indexes. Those dominant search players rely on user tracking and profiling to power ads and personalise results.
We don’t collect personal data or build user profiles. By default, we also block privacy-invasive ads and trackers, third-party data storage and browser fingerprinting, and we upgrade every webpage possible to secure https connections. In other words, we let people search without being the product.
From an advertiser perspective, our users are a very special target group – people who are confident enough to make up their own minds and are not just lemmings doing the same thing as everybody else. This is the group that marketers want to usually reach – they need people who are willing to try something different.
We also represent a far less saturated ad environment, giving brands an edge over competitors who exclusively buy Google Ads. As of October 2025, our browser surpassed 100 million monthly active users
2. What do you think the future holds for search and PPC in the next two or three years?
Everything is changing. The SEO ecosystem we have had for the past two decades works less and less well – effectively, it is in the process of being dismantled, by AI and other things.
Machine-driven search is fundamentally reshaping the internet. We are all accustomed to Google and Microsoft being gateways to the web, sending traffic to other sites, but that is no longer their business model – they are now AI-powered destination platforms that extract answers and serve them directly to users.
AI agents are emerging that will dominate personal and professional tasks like scheduling, research, automation, browser navigation, form-filling, and dynamic decision-making – all of which demand reliable, full-scale web search.
Those agentic systems will require a restructured internet that allows them to interact directly with websites.
Some analysts show machine search overtaking human-initiated queries in volume in the near future. We are seeing that very clearly – nearly 800,000 users of OpenClaw, the leading open-source platform for building autonomous AI agents, have signed up to use our Search API and integrate the service as their agent’s primary web search tool.
When humans were the only ones searching, they made roughly 2.5 Google searches a day, and looking forward that potentially scales to hundreds or thousands per day per active agent.
3. What regions are you in, and what is the importance of the UK market for you?
Brave has been around for over 10 years globally, and since the launch of Brave Search we have seen double digital growth in our key markets – US, UK, France and Germany.
The UK accounts for more than 5% of our total search volume, so it is an important market for us. It provides a benchmark for European ad performance, helping us refine our ad delivery algorithms and advertiser relationships for other European markets.
4. You’re a privacy-centric, ad-blocking browser, but at the same time you have an ad business. Talk us through that.
There is no contradiction, in the sense that our ads are privacy-safe and anonymous, and they don’t track, collect or profile user data. We only target by the query itself and the user’s country. Nothing else plays a role. The browser can remember ad exposures, but we never use third-party cookies and we don’t track any ad IDs.
In terms of the advertisers themselves, they are overwhelmingly supportive of our entry into the paid search market – basically because Google has far too much pricing power and everyone agrees there should be more competition.
5. Everyone obviously uses search, but what is unique about Brave? And why should advertisers be interested?
We are an independent, privacy-first search engine, and that is only possible because we use our own search index, which ensures results are not manipulated by surveillance capitalism.
And because we block ads and trackers by default, we load pages 3x to 6x faster than Chrome and Safari on desktop, and up to 8x faster on Android, saving users’ CPU and battery life, and eliminating processing overhead.
Our advertisers know that by buying on Brave Search, they are contributing directly to the development of a more competitive and fair search advertising market.
And in addition to the prominence we can give them in a much less saturated environment, they are reaching an incremental audience of engaged users and tech early-adopters who value privacy and independence and aren’t simultaneously on Google. If you want to get them, you need to get them on Brave.
6. What kind of verticals does Brave work with?
We target the top 1% of paid search advertisers in our primary target regions. Today, over half of the top 20 largest paid search advertisers worldwide are customers of Brave Search, in verticals including e-commerce, travel, personal finance homeware and entertainment ticketing.
With their help, we’re constantly discovering new ways to achieve scale and improve the effectiveness of our advertising platform.
7. If you could give one piece of advice to search marketers trying to prove ROI more effectively, what would it be?
Focus on precision over volume, and test before committing: we give first-time advertisers a free test to assess click volume and attribution capabilities, and to let them assess ROAS before they agree on a cost-per-click.
8. You were an early mover on AI – what have you learned along the way? And what’s coming next?
We launched our conversational ads, Ask Brave, in Q3 2025. Those ads appear within the answers section of the conversations, and they’re highlighted as sponsored and relevant to that result. We automate the creation of ads based on paid SERP/organic ads, so clients don’t need to do any work on that themselves.
That’s important, because early reports from clients suggest other conversational AI companies need help with creative and take three to six months to launch.
In terms of other things we have learnt, early reporting shows you get a lower CTR across conversational AI ads when several ads appear within one conversation. That is why, unlike other conversational AI companies, we don’t monetise every conversation. It’s important to align ads with the right intent.
As for what’s coming next, our AI Summarizer, which provides concise and to-the-point answers at the top of Brave Search results pages, launched in 2024, and we will be introducing ads to that when it makes sense. The same goes for Brave Leo, our Agentic AI/chatbot, which launched in 2024.