The developers at Brave Software, the company behind the privacy-focused browser and search engine, have introduced the Ask Brave feature, which combines search and an AI chat into a single interface.
The Ask Brave feature is free, accessible from any browser at search.brave.com/ask, and was designed with a focus on privacy. Essentially, the new system combines traditional search results with AI-generated answers, allowing users to receive responses to their queries in a chat-style format.
Ask Brave does not replace AI Answers — the AI summarizer for Brave Search launched in 2023, which will continue to operate as before. The developers claim this feature generates over 15 million answers daily, but that’s not enough to bridge the gap between traditional search results and LLM answers. That’s exactly why Ask Brave was created.
“With Ask Brave, users will no longer have to choose between different tools depending on the action they want to take, switching between traditional search engines with their ten blue links and chat interfaces with their walls of text,” the announcement says. “Brave solves this problem by offering a system that combines the best of both approaches, eliminating unnecessary switching between platforms and the tedious copy and paste.”
Users can access Ask Brave by finishing their search query with a double question mark “??” in Brave Search, by pressing the Ask button in Brave Search (search.brave.com), or by clicking the Ask tab on the search results page.
Ask Brave operates in two modes: standard and advanced. In the latter, it runs multiple search cycles to avoid missing details and provide the user with exhaustive, detailed answers.
According to the developers, Ask Brave draws information from the internet and is less likely to hallucinate or include irrelevant information in its answers.
It is also emphasized that all chats with Ask Brave are encrypted, messages are not used for AI training, and they are deleted after 24 hours of inactivity. In addition, Brave Search does not log users’ IP addresses, so conversations related to search queries cannot be linked to specific users.