Brave Search Crawler (Bravebot)
| Vendor | Brave Software |
| Type | Independent search crawler |
| robots.txt token | BraveBot |
| JavaScript rendering | Yes |
| Honors robots.txt | Yes |
| Vendor docs | search.brave.com/help/brave-search-crawler |
User-Agent
Brave's crawler deliberately does not advertise a distinguishing User-Agent in the standard HTTP request. The reason given by Brave: to avoid being discriminated against by sites that allow Googlebot but block independent crawlers, Brave's bot identifies itself with a generic browser UA.
The robots.txt token, however, is BraveBot. Site owners can still control Brave's access:
User-agent: BraveBot
Disallow: /Brave's crawler honors this even though it doesn't send a distinguishing UA in HTTP requests.
Purpose
Brave Search is one of the few search engines in 2026 with its own independent index (not licensed from Google or Bing). The crawler collects pages for that index. Brave's "Goggles" feature also lets users customize ranking on top of the index.
Quirks
- The "no distinguishing UA" decision is unusual and controversial.
It means sites cannot detect Brave's crawler in their logs by UA alone — they would have to know Brave's IP ranges.
- Brave has stated that if a URL is not crawlable by Googlebot
(per robots.txt), Brave's crawler will also not crawl it. Effectively, Brave's policy is "we respect any policy you set for Googlebot too."
How to allow / block
Brave specifically:
User-agent: BraveBot
Disallow: /Block everyone except Brave-class crawlers: not practical since Brave's UA is indistinguishable.