Brendan Eich posted Brave’s October numbers on 3 November, and they are the first clean growth print since the New York Times and Tribune papers sued the company over Ask Brave, the Search API and paywall bypass. The browser cleared 130.77 million monthly active users for the first time. Monthly growth accelerated to 1.9% from September’s 1.6%. Peak daily actives hit 55.42 million, with a record 7.26 billion minutes of use in a single day. Brave Search processed 2.71 billion queries in October and set a one-day record of 91.77 million on 25 October — the first time it crossed 90 million.
Those are company figures, announced on Eich’s own account rather than in a formal investor deck, but the shape of the story matters more than the decimal places. Brave Search is no longer just the default box inside a Chromium fork. Eich said 10.1% of October’s monthly searches came from people who were not using the Brave browser at all. That share has been climbing from around 8% over the summer. Chrome and Safari users are deliberately choosing Brave’s index.
Search as a destination, not a default
That 10% external share is the line I would circle. Defaults still decide most of the world’s query volume, which is why the CMA choice-screen fight keeps coming back. But a privacy browser that can pull a tenth of its search traffic from outside its own chrome is building a second distribution channel: people who type in a destination. That is closer to how DuckDuckGo grew than to how Yahoo or Ecosia live as resellers of someone else’s results.
It also changes how you read Brave’s monetisation line. Eich closed the thread with a blunt summary of the bill-payers: “search API + ads, browser ads, premium products, crypto deals.” Search API sits first. We covered the agent-facing bx402 pay-per-search experiment last week. The licensed Search API that already feeds grounding and training pipelines is the older, larger pipe — and it is exactly the product the publishers named in Monday’s complaints.
Growth and litigation on the same week
On 2 November the Times and three Tribune titles sued Brave in the Southern District of New York, treating the independent index as a wholesale content supplier to Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. Our full read of both complaints is already live. Twenty-four hours later Eich published the strongest monthly usage print Brave has ever put out. The market is still adding users and queries while the legal risk is attaching to the index itself.
That tension is the editorial point. If your reporting on non-Google search still treats Brave as a niche browser story, October’s numbers say otherwise: 2.71 billion queries, a rising share of destination traffic, and an API that Eich puts at the front of the revenue stack. If your legal or brand-safety work treats the Search API as a settled wholesale channel, Monday’s filings say the opposite. Both can be true at once for a few months. They will not stay independent of each other forever.
My take
Watch three series into December: monthly MAU and query prints (does growth slow once the suit is widely covered?), the share of search from non-Brave browsers (the destination signal), and any interim change to News Search, LLM Context or Ask Brave crawl behaviour while Brave answers the complaints. For SEOs auditing visibility in Brave answers, annotate 3 November next to 2 November: the growth story and the copyright story are now the same product timeline. Primary source for the stats is Eich’s 3 November thread; for the legal risk, the case numbers in our earlier piece.