Brave sells access to its search index to AI companies — and now it is being sued for how it built that index. Search Engine Journal reported on November 6 that Brave sells access via the Brave Search API to AI companies including Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity and You.com, and that its index holds over 30 billion pages, with millions of new pages indexed each day. On November 2, the New York Times sued Brave, alleging it copied more than 30 billion webpages without identifying itself or providing website owners with any mechanism to block its crawler, and then sold that content to AI companies. Brave had not responded when the article was written. The Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a separate case the same day, and News Corp sued Brave in July 2026, according to Semafor, saying Brave hides its crawlers.
The lawsuit's central claim is about control. Brave's crawler does not advertise a differentiated user agent and follows Googlebot's rules — so a site cannot block Brave without also blocking Google. The only opt-out is the noindex tag, which also drops the page from Google. For a publisher, that is no choice at all: block Brave and lose Google, or keep Google and let Brave take the content.
That design is what makes the case different from the usual scraping disputes. Most crawlers can be blocked individually through robots.txt. Brave, by following Googlebot's rules without its own identity, effectively bundles itself with the search engine every site needs. The Times argues that is not an accident but a strategy — copying the web under Google's cover and selling the result to AI companies that compete with the publishers whose work was taken.
The Brave case sits alongside the October 30 announcement by Google, Microsoft and OpenAI of a shared robots.txt signal for opting out of AI training — a signal none of the three supports yet. The industry is inching toward a system where publishers can say no to training. Brave's alleged approach is the opposite: a crawler that cannot be told no without also telling Google no.
The outcome will matter beyond Brave. If the courts find that copying 30 billion pages without identification or opt-out is unlawful, every AI company that built its index the same way faces the same question. If Brave wins, publishers will need a different mechanism — technical or legal — to control how their content feeds AI systems. Either way, the case is a referendum on whether the web's content can be taken first and negotiated later.
For site owners, the immediate action is a thirty-second check: a site search for your domain on search.brave.com shows whether your pages are in Brave's index. If they are, you are in the index of a company that sells to AI firms — and, for now, you have no granular way out.
More broadly, the case is a reminder that the index is the asset. Whoever holds a copy of the web can sell access to it, and the terms on which that copy was taken are now being litigated. Link builders should care because the value of a link depends partly on the health of the ecosystem it sits in. An ecosystem where content is taken without consent or compensation is one where fewer publishers survive to be linked to — and that is a cost the whole industry pays.
The case will also test how much identification a crawler owes the web. Brave's crawler follows Googlebot's rules without advertising its own identity, which means site owners cannot distinguish it from Google in their logs or their robots.txt files. That invisibility is central to the Times' complaint: a crawler that cannot be identified cannot be blocked, and a crawler that cannot be blocked has taken the choice away from the publisher. If the courts agree that crawlers must identify themselves, the ruling would reach far beyond Brave — every AI company that scrapes without a distinct user agent would have to change how it operates. The technical fix is simple, which is what makes the alleged failure to implement it look deliberate rather than accidental.
Sources: Search Engine Journal, November 6, 2026.
Related reading on this site: Google Moved Brand AI Overviews Into the Right Column, Microsoft Splits Bing Copilot Search Into AI Mode and AI Overview, Google Ads May Count Offline Conversions in the Wrong Accounts, AI Knows What Your Brand Does — But Not Who It's For, SEO Can't Fix a Broken Sales Process, and Google Merchant Center Will Require 500×500 Product Images From January 31, 2027.
Linkbaits helps you create content that earns citations and backlinks. Start with the free tools and build your first linkable asset this week.
Start free trial