New York Times sues Brave over 30 billion webpages sold to AI companies
The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Brave on November 2, alleging the company copied more than 30 billion webpages without identifying its crawler or giving site owners a way to block it, then sold that content to AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. Brave sells access to its search index through the Brave Search API, which its About page says is used by…
Key points
- NYT alleges Brave copied 30+ billion pages without a named crawler or opt-out mechanism
- Brave Search API sells index access to Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, Cohere
- Brave's crawler follows Googlebot rules; sites must use noindex to opt out, losing Google too
Brave's help page states its crawler "does not advertise a differentiated user agent," meaning it has no unique name in robots.txt. Brave says it follows Googlebot's permissions, so sites cannot allow Google while blocking Brave. The only opt-out Brave offers is the noindex tag, which also removes pages from Google. A separate case was filed the same day by the Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel. In July 2026, News Corp sued Brave over similar crawler concealment claims, per Semafor.
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Brave Sells Its Search Index To AI, And Your Website Is Probably In It via @sejournal, @slobodanmanic
Search Engine Journal · 6 November 2026
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This text was published by Search Engine Journal and written by Slobodan Manic. It is reproduced here with attribution so you can read it in full; the rights remain with the publisher. Read it at the source ↗
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