Brave Search Introduces Chat Mode, Bridging the Gap Between Search Engines and AI Assistants
Brave Search has announced the global rollout of chat mode for its Answer with AI feature, enabling users to engage in follow-up questions from their initial search queries. This enhancement comes as Brave’s AI-powered summaries have gained significant traction, now generating over 11 million answers daily.
The new feature represents a strategic move to combine the strengths of traditional search engines with modern AI chat capabilities. While search engines excel at retrieving web content from single queries but lack contextual follow-ups, chat applications maintain conversation context but often struggle with broad web searches. Brave’s solution adapts to each query type, automatically providing summaries with a chat bar for question-like queries.
The system utilizes a combination of open-source and internal language models (LLMs), alongside Brave Search results, to ground responses in real-time search data and reduce AI hallucinations. Notable in the competitive landscape, Brave Search offers these features without requiring user accounts, maintaining strong privacy standards by making conversations ephemeral and automatically expiring them after six hours.
Comparing with competitors, Brave Search stands out for its privacy-first approach. Unlike Google’s Gemini, Bing’s Copilot, Perplexity, or ChatGPT, which collect user data for service improvement and personalization, Brave doesn’t profile users or store search history. The service is freely available to all users, though reasonable usage limits apply.
The new chat feature preserves all existing privacy protections from Brave Search and Answer with AI. Users can access the feature through search.brave.com or directly from their browser’s address bar if Brave Search is set as the default search engine. The company also announced plans to integrate chat saving capabilities with its Leo AI assistant in the future.
