• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, 6 hours ago

Brave's agentic AI tools drive rapid growth for the company, resulting in nearly 700,000 OpenClaw users adopting its search API as their main Web search tool to build out AI agentic agents.

OpenClaw, an open-source AI platform developed by Peter Steinberger and since acquired by OpenAI, will remain an open-source tool.

Brave Search has become the default for most new users of its Brave browser, which has 110 million users. It is pulling in brands with marketers that see “measurable” performance growth.

Brave has brought in more new customers for Adam & Eve than any other channel, according to Regan Bigelow, the company’s search marketing director.

“It’s the level of hands-on support and strategic guidance that stands out,” she said. “It’s not one-size-fits-all, but tailored to our business and evolving needs.”

Brave handles hundreds of millions of daily queries based on widespread adoption, according to JP Schmetz, chief of ads for Brave Search. He said its Search Ads revenue rose 5X, while clicks increased over 5X and search queries were up 55% in 2025.  

While its API gets several billion queries per month, Schmetz declined to publicly share exact numbers. He did say Snowflake, Cohere, and Mistral are major customers.

Its search index has more than 40 billion webpages and a monthly volume of more than 2 billion queries.

It's the API that helps organizations supply AI large language models (LLMs) with real-time data, power agentic search, train foundation models, and create search-enabled software.

Agentic has powered growth for Brave Search, with an index of more than 40 billion webpages and a monthly volume of more than 2 billion queries.

Access to an independent Web search index becomes essential. Only three major search providers -- Google, Microsoft Bing, and Brave -- work well, but changes in the way online advertising works have altered the availability of APIs. 

Google and Microsoft have independently shifted their business models from being gateways to the web, which send traffic to other sites, to being AI-powered destination platforms that provide the answers without sending people to the information's destinations.

This means agentic systems will require a restructured internet. Agents need to interact directly with websites to perform tasks such as booking dining reservations.

“Let's be clear, it’s not yet the case, but it will be rewritten in the next couple of years,” Schmetz said. “Agents must have the ability to speak with websites.”

In the next couple of years, agentic will push Brave Ask, which is more like an LLM experience, into building more specialized APIs.

For example, a user can say “I want to know more about breast cancer, but I only want answers from Mayo Clinic, Hoag, and UCLA Breast Centers.”

“We see a large increase in users of this tool," Schmetz said. “You can query ‘restaurants in Lisbon, but specifically from these 17 sites,’ and list the sites.”

Brave’s Search API has become an alternative to “zero data” as AI companies scramble for data to train models. Schmetz says Brave began running AI-based summaries in search for one year prior to Google.

Developing AI tools for advertisers and developers fueled swift growth, leading to nearly 700,000 OpenClaw users making its search API their primary option.

“Advertisers can see what happens when there’s an AI summary around the ads and in the results,” Schmetz said, adding that Brave does not track users.

Brave matches user queries to ads, and shares clickthrough rates with the advertiser. If an advertiser gains a click from the ad, a couple of parameters can tell them whether the click resulted in a sale.

“That’s all that matters in search,” Schmetz said, along with the incremental clicks that they cannot buy at Google. “Large advertisers can gain 1% or 2% incremental revenue from additional clicks they cannot get from Google” and do it without much more work to set up a campaign, because the system is fully automated.

Brave Search is one of the three largest independent indexes in the Western world, he said, putting the company in the same basket as Google and Bing.

It works well for the “many, many” AI agents that cannot or do not use Google or Bing, he said. AI needs to speak with a search engine. If the AI agent cannot electronically communicate with the restaurant when trying to make a reservation, it will not know that it’s real.

When the AI receives a query, it plans what to do next to answer the question. If the question involves fact, the AI will issue a plan to answer these queries. Many times -- and more often lately than not, per Brave’s internal data -- the question is answered with support from Brave.

When asked how Brave keeps track of the number of queries each large language model requests, Schmetz explained that each LLM company requests in advance requests a certain number of queries per second. Brave doesn’t save the queries, but knows the number that each LLM sends.

The LLM tells Brave the maximum amount of queries they want to answer per second to ensure Brave can handle the load without latency.

“It’s a very important, because LLMs do not want to act illegally,” he said, adding that he meant as a scraper of the internet.

AI enabled Brave Search ads to reach a 5X revenue growth rate in 2025; click volume grew by more than 5X, and overall search queries jumped 55%.

Brave Search now supports 10 of the leading online search advertisers, and serves large brands across multiple markets. Some of the largest  — Amazon, Booking.com, eBay, Etsy, Nerdwallet, Priceline, StubHub, T-Mobile, TurboTax, Wayfair — ran campaigns in 2025.

Schmetz expects Brave Search Ads to grow at least at the same pace in 2026 as they did in 2025, contributing to Brave’s "nine-figure annualized revenue and profitability."

Most know Brave for its browser that blocks ad trackers, but there are two different types of advertising: search ads, a more traditional method, and programmatic, which will take the biggest impact based on AI technologies.  

Brave does not block search ads, but it does prevent some programmatic ads from serving up. These are the ads where companies build a profile of consumer behavior based on browsing history and then retarget them based on data.