Brave Search's Answer with AI is a free, privacy-focused AI answer engine from Brave Software, Inc. that generates cited answers directly inside Brave Search results, drawing on Brave's own independent web index rather than Google's or Bing's. It's built for anyone who wants quick, sourced answers to search queries alongside traditional results, without paying for the feature or being tracked.
What it is
Answer with AI sits inside the regular Brave Search results page: instead of replacing search, it adds a synthesized, cited answer above the usual list of links. Brave positions it as one of the few real-time answer engines that doesn't depend on Big Tech search infrastructure, saying its answers 'result from the only independent search index at scale outside of Big Tech, as the largest real-time answer engines rely on the Google or Bing search engines, directly or indirectly.'
How it answers and cites sources
Answer with AI produces near-instant answers with sources cited, shown alongside the traditional search results for the same query. Those answers are drawn from Brave's own web index, built with its own crawler — the vendor notes that 'every search engine that has its own index necessarily has its own web crawler' — rather than from a licensed or partner index.
Pricing and access
Answer with AI is free for all users. Brave states: 'The Brave Search answer engine is free to all users, and we hope to keep it this way, as we believe this is a natural evolution of search engines,' and that it's 'available for free to all users across platforms, on both desktop and mobile.' Developers can access Brave's underlying index separately through the paid Brave Search API, which offers up to five snippets from over 30 billion pages; exact API pricing isn't detailed in the sources reviewed, so check Brave's API page directly. Answer with AI itself supports search in five languages: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
Privacy and data use
Brave says it does not collect personal information about you, your device, or your searches. However, Brave Search's servers are hosted by Amazon Web Services in the United States, not the EU, according to Brave's own privacy notice — so while Brave describes a no-personal-data-collection approach, EU-based hosting is not documented, which may matter for organizations with strict data-residency requirements.
Who it's for
Answer with AI fits people who already use Brave Search and want a quick, cited summary without leaving the results page, as well as anyone specifically choosing Brave for its stated privacy approach and independent index rather than a Big Tech search backend. Because it's free and currently covers English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, it's most useful today for queries in one of those five languages.