Originally published August 2023. Updated April 2026 with growth figures, Leo AI, Goggles, and current standing as a Google alternative.
Brave Search cut its last dependency on Bing for image and video results in August 2023 — and three years later, that single infrastructure decision has compounded into something worth paying attention to if you care about where your search queries actually go.
Key Takeaways
- Brave Search built its own image and video index in 2023 — no Bing, no Google APIs anywhere in the stack, including media results
- 1.6 billion queries per month as of late 2025, with 101 million monthly active users and search revenue up 5x year-over-year
- Leo AI integrates directly with Brave Search and routes through anonymising proxies — your queries don't go to OpenAI
- Goggles lets you customise result rankings with community-created or personal filter sets — possible only because Brave owns its own index
- Brave Search API now powers most of the top-10 LLMs with real-time web data — it's infrastructure at this point, not just a consumer product
What the 2023 Feature Actually Fixed
Before August 2023, roughly 7% of Brave Search results came from Bing's API — including all image and video queries. You were using a private front end, but Microsoft's infrastructure was still in the loop on every media search: logging request metadata, collecting IP addresses, feeding the same data collection pipeline you were trying to avoid.
The fix was structural. Brave built and now maintains its own image and video index. A search for images on Brave Search in 2026 touches no third-party infrastructure. DuckDuckGo, for comparison, still routes image results through Bing. That's not a criticism so much as a statement of fact about what "private search" means structurally — the front end matters less than who processes the query.
The Bing censorship incident makes the independence argument concrete. In 2021, Bing blocked "tank man" image results globally — not just in China — because its API served the same filtered index everywhere. Brave, depending on Bing at the time, inherited that censorship. An independent index is the only fix that actually works. Brave is the only major privacy-focused search engine that has built one. That's the relevant comparison point, and it hasn't changed.
For a deeper look at how browsers handle fingerprinting and tracking at the infrastructure level: Browser Fingerprinting: A Deep Dive.
Where Brave Search Stands in 2026
The numbers from late 2025 aren't marginal. According to Brave's own reporting:
- 101 million monthly active users
- 42–44 million daily active users
- ~1.6 billion search queries per month
- Search Ads revenue up 5x year-over-year in 2025
- Queries up 55%; clicks up 5x
- Nine-figure annualised revenue; Brave is profitable
For context: DuckDuckGo launched in 2008 and reached roughly 100 million daily searches at its peak. Brave Search launched in 2021 and is at 42–44 million DAU four years in. The trajectory is not comparable.
The Brave Search API is now the real-time web data source for most of the top-10 LLMs. When an AI assistant needs current information from the web, there's a meaningful chance it's querying Brave's index. Brave has also published SOC 2 Type II attestation for Brave Search and a zero data retention option for API customers — these are transparency moves that signal the product is being taken seriously beyond the consumer market.
Leo — AI That Doesn't Route Through OpenAI
Brave's in-browser AI assistant Leo integrates directly with Brave Search for real-time answers. The privacy architecture matters here: Leo doesn't send your queries to OpenAI. Brave runs its own model inference and routes queries through anonymising proxies, so individual users can't be identified from query patterns.
In 2025, Brave shipped two meaningful Leo additions. The Skills feature gives you keyboard-shortcut access to frequently used AI tasks — no typing a prompt from scratch every time. And in December 2025, agentic browsing arrived in Brave Nightly: the browser can execute multi-step tasks autonomously using Leo as the orchestration layer.
The privacy comparison with mainstream AI assistants is worth making explicit. Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Copilot are all tied to your account, trained on usage data, and in some cases processed on third-party infrastructure. Leo's architecture is designed from the ground up to not accumulate a user profile. For the full picture on how mainstream AI assistants handle your data: AI Assistants and Privacy: Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant.
Goggles — Search You Can Actually Control
Goggles is a Brave Search feature that lets you apply custom ranking rules to results. You can prioritise independent sources, exclude specific domains, or apply community-created filter sets — a programming Goggle that surfaces GitHub and Stack Overflow above SEO farms, a tech news Goggle that filters out press releases.
In January 2025, Brave expanded Goggles to let regular users upvote and downvote sites to improve their personal results. The feature exists because Brave owns its index. Google's ranking algorithm is a black box by design because it's directly tied to advertising revenue — changing rankings would change who pays. Brave has no such conflict on the organic side, which is why Goggles is possible at all.
The Honest Tradeoff
Brave Search is genuinely private and genuinely independent. The tradeoff is result depth. For niche queries, long-tail technical documentation, or anything significantly outside the English-speaking web, Google still wins. Brave's ranking signals improve with query volume — 1.6 billion monthly queries is substantial — but it's not equivalent to Google's 20-year head start.
I've been running Brave Search as my default for the past year — falling back to Google maybe once or twice a week for very specific technical queries where index depth still shows the gap. The practical recommendation: set Brave Search as your default. Fall back to Google when results are insufficient. This is the same approach privacy-conscious users have taken with DuckDuckGo for years — except Brave's independence guarantee is structurally stronger because Brave owns the full stack. DuckDuckGo's privacy is real; its infrastructure independence is not.
If you're optimising your browser setup more broadly, How to Configure uBlock Origin covers the tracker-blocking layer that works alongside any search engine, and The Ultimate Guide to Firefox Hardening covers the browser-level setup for users who want the most control. Brave is the better default for people who want strong privacy without configuration; Firefox with uBlock Origin is the better choice for people who want granular control.
What to Do
- Set Brave Search as your default at search.brave.com — free, no account required, works in any browser
- Enable Leo in the Brave browser for AI queries that stay off third-party servers
- Explore Goggles if you do research in a specific domain — community filter sets exist for programming, academia, and privacy-focused results
- Watch the ad model — Brave has announced ads are coming to the free tier; a premium ad-free tier will be available
Serious about browser privacy? Proton Mail pairs well with a private browser — end-to-end encrypted email, Swiss jurisdiction, no data mining. Free tier available.
Sources: Brave Search image/video independence · Brave Search API growth · Brave Search zero data retention · Leo roadmap 2025 · Leo Skills · MediaPost: Brave 2026
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