Brave's Search Index Sold to AI: Checking Your Exposure

Is Your Website Already in Brave's Index?

Sani Manić, writing for No Hacks and republished by Search Engine Journal, examines the New York Times lawsuit against Brave and what it means for ordinary websites. The core argument is that Brave sells access to a search index of more than 30 billion pages to AI companies, and that its crawler does not announce itself with a distinct name, which makes it hard for site owners to block it without also blocking Google. The author shows how to check whether your own pages appear in the index using a simple site search.

For brand builders, the piece is a useful reminder that the content you publish may feed AI answers you never see and cannot easily control. Anyone responsible for a website, its robots.txt rules or its SEO should read it, and the check takes only a few minutes. The allegations are still unproven, so treat the article as an informed warning rather than settled fact.