Brave updates its AI-powered search with a detailed answers feature

Browser maker and Google Search alternative Brave announced on Monday that it’s adding a new feature to its AI-powered search suite, Ask Brave, to provide detailed answers on a topic based on the query.

The search company said that this new feature will co-exist next to its AI Answers feature, which was introduced last year to give summarized responses to search queries. The company said that people are getting more than 15 million answers every day.

You don’t need to switch to a special mode to use Ask Brave. The search engine will automatically recognize what kind of query you are asking and give a response accordingly.

You can use the ask button next to the Brave search box to begin a search. You can also turn your normal search query into an AI search query by tapping into the Ask tab on the search page result. If you have the Brave search as your default search engine, you can append a double question mark (“??”) to a query to begin an ask Brave search query.

“While AI Answers give our users quick summaries, Ask Brave provides longer answers, follow-ups, and a chat mode enhanced with Deep Research, and most importantly, contextually relevant enrichments such as videos, news articles, products, businesses, shopping, and more — in the right place, at the right time,” said the chief of search at Brave, Josep M. Pujol, in a statement. “Search makes it possible, LLMs glue it together. We anticipate that Ask Brave will generate millions more daily AI-powered answers with this powerful combination of search and chat, and look forward to deploying more useful AI-powered search tools for our users.”

The format of the answer you get out of Ask Brave is more akin to a report format that you get out of ChatGPT or Perplexity, which includes links, videos, and image carousels. Once you get the answer, you can ask the AI chatbot to convert the answer into a different format or ask follow-up questions.

Brave said that it is using the company’s own API to ground search results for accuracy, along with deep research for certain queries.

AI-powered Q&A is now creeping into various search experiences. Google has expanded its AI mode to multiple languages, including a global rollout for Spanish last week. Brave’s feature is similar but comes with a privacy claim that the company encrypts users’ chats and deletes them after 24 hours of inactivity.