Brave Search Help

Search Ads conversion reporting

Thank you for supporting Brave Search by clicking a private ad. These ads allow Brave to provide a free search engine to everyone.

What are private search ads?

To answer this question, consider an ad for a hypothetical laundry-folding robot from Interstellar Robotics. It’s great technology, but not enough people know about it, so the company decides to buy an ad on Brave Search. This ad will appear at the top of the search results whenever someone searches the query “fold laundry.”

Private Search Ad screenshot

If you were to click Interstellar’s Brave Search ad, you’d be taken to their product page, and your browser would temporarily store the address of the conversion page, the one you would land on after a successful credit card payment.

If you were to then purchase one of these robots, your browser would notice that you have reached the conversion page, and contact a Brave-operated server to report that an anonymous Brave user made a purchase.

On the server side, Brave will add up all of the ad clicks and purchases related to this ad, and deliver a report to Interstellar Robotics.

Anonymous Report screenshot

How does the Brave browser + Brave Search Ads system keep users anonymous?

We do this in a few ways:

  • We designed the browser to share only the minimum amount of information when anonymously reporting interactions with an ad.
  • The browser reports these interactions only if you’ve actually clicked a Brave Search ad, and only for that ad.
  • We configure the CDN that receives this information to remove IP addresses.

This ensures Brave will not have enough information to determine who you are (not that we even want to), either as an individual or as a singled-out member of the group of purchasers reported to our server. Additionally, we can’t tell that two reports about two different ads are coming from the same person. This is by design, as we have no need for this information. Essentially, Brave only has a count of Brave users who purchased the product, but not enough metadata about these users to single them out from that group of people.

Why does Brave share aggregate Brave Search Ad numbers with advertisers?

Advertising helps us provide a free search engine to everyone. Running a comprehensive, independent search engine requires a lot of resources, including:

  • The operation of computers to visit websites and index their pages
  • The cost of paying for services to do currency conversions, provide weather information, or sports results
  • Other storage and bandwidth costs

Most of these costs increase as Brave Search becomes more popular and attracts more users. So how do we pay for all of this?

Some of it is covered by the users who sign up to Brave Search Premium. We are grateful to our Premium Search subscribers but do not expect most users to subscribe. The bulk of the revenue therefore comes from privacy-respecting and privacy-preserving contextual ads, where advertisers can buy ads for specific keywords.

When paying to advertise with us, these advertisers want to ensure that they’re making good use of their money. Specifically, they want to understand:

  • How many users clicked their ad?
  • How many users bought the product after clicking the ad?

Without these data points, an advertiser wouldn’t be able to justify spending more money with Brave, and Brave Search could not continue to offer its service for free to all users.

How can I opt out of Brave Search Ads?

There are two ways to opt out of seeing Brave Search Ads:

Alternatively, you could simply opt to never click on a Brave Search Ad. In this case conversion URL data would never be stored on your device.

Why can’t advertisers get these measurements in a different way?

Normally, this kind of measurement is done by tracking individual users (which Brave does not do) and/or by relying on sketchy third-party technology (which the Brave browser blocks by default).

This means that the privacy-eroding tools advertisers currently rely on to measure campaign effectiveness are usually blocked by the Brave browser. Some larger advertisers have their own first-party systems that are not blocked by Brave by default, but the majority of advertisers rely on commonly-available third-party tools.

We also chose not to build mechanisms in our browser to let third-party websites store information or receive aggregate reports when our users interact with ads and websites. Instead, we built a first-party system that takes advantage of the integration between Brave Search and the Brave browser to collect the necessary information directly.

You can read more about our position on privacy-respecting ad measurement at https://brave.com/blog/mozilla-ppa/.

How long is Brave Ads data stored in my browser?

Either for 1 day, 7 days, or 30 days, depending on the ad campaign.

Is Brave Ads data stored if I search in private browsing?

No, the browser stores this data only in normal browsing windows. Therefore your purchase in a private window will not be included in the aggregate numbers shared with the advertiser.

Can I see what conversion addresses my browser is watching?

Yes, at brave://ads-internals.

Ads Internals screenshot

To view the list of all conversion addresses which are currently active in worldwide Brave Search ad campaigns, see https://static.ads.brave.com/v1/conversion-patterns/serp.

Can I delete this information? What will happen if I do?

Yes, you can delete this information from your browser. To do so, visit brave://settings/clearBrowserData and click Clear Brave Ads data. The information will then be removed from your device.

Clear Brave Ads data screenshot

You can also delete this information from brave://ads-internals.

Deleting this information means that Brave Search won’t get credit for your purchase of any products you found via a click on a Brave Search ad.