Published 04.11.2026
On November 2, 2026, The New York Times sued Brave. The Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit the same day. The publishers allege that Brave copied their articles with a bot that has no name of its own and sold access to its index to AI companies. These are only allegations: no court has ruled.
What Brave itself says
- No separate name. The bot doesn't identify itself with its own user agent, so you can't write a Brave-only rule in robots.txt. Third-party lists show a
Bravebottoken, but Brave's help page doesn't mention it. - The bot follows Googlebot. Where Googlebot is blocked, Brave's bot won't go either.
- robots.txt doesn't remove a page from the index. That takes
noindex, and Brave has to fetch the page again. You can request this through Brave's form.
What to do
- If you want to be in Brave Search: don't block Googlebot.
- If you don't: add
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">. It's a general rule, so the page also leaves other search engines, including Google. - Don't block Googlebot because of Brave: you'd lose Google along with it.
Where AI comes in
The suit names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as buyers of Brave's data. They aren't defendants. If that's accurate, Brave's index may affect what these assistants know about your site.
Check your site
We don't test Brave's bot separately because it has no name of its own. But the free aiseen.cloud check shows whether your site is open to Googlebot and AI bots.
Sources: TechCrunch, Brave help.