New York Times sues Brave, whose AI crawler you can't block without blocking Google

The New York Times sued Brave Software on Nov. 2, accusing it of copying more than 30 billion webpages and reselling access to that index to five AI companies, through a crawler that most software marketers cannot block without also blocking Google.

What the lawsuit alleges

The Times, along with the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, filed two federal copyright suits against Brave in the Southern District of New York on Nov. 2, according to PPC Land's review of the complaints. The filings target three Brave products: the Brave Search API, which resells index access to outside companies; Ask Brave, an AI-answer feature that draws on that same index; and a built-in paywall-bypass setting. Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere are named in the complaints as API buyers, though none of them is a defendant.

The papers ran their own tests before filing. Ask Brave returned more than 400 words of a Times article verbatim, and over 1,200 words of a Tribune article, per PPC Land's account of the filings. A test of the API's "LLM Context" endpoint returned 1,291 of 1,295 words in a single story, essentially the whole piece. Brave had not filed a response to either suit as of this writing.

"Brave's products and services output summaries of, and verbatim language from, The Times's content."

That line comes from the Times's own 2025 warning letter to Brave, quoted in the complaint as evidence Brave knew what its products were doing well before this suit.

Each complaint brings five counts: three forms of copyright infringement, a DMCA circumvention claim tied to the paywall-bypass setting, and a New York unjust-enrichment claim over ad revenue the papers say Brave captured by replacing their ads. Per PPC Land's review of the filings, the suits seek statutory and actual damages, a permanent injunction and a jury trial, with no specific dollar figure stated. One complaint does cite an outside estimate that Brave brought in more than $100 million in 2025 revenue overall — a company-wide figure, not one tied to the search index specifically.

This is not Brave's first fight over its index. News Corp earlier sent Brave a cease-and-desist, and Brave sued first, arguing that indexing the web is simply what any search engine does, per SEJ's account of that dispute. News Corp countersued in July 2026, accusing Brave of hiding its crawler so publishers cannot detect or block it. Every plaintiff so far has made the same underlying complaint: the index exists, it is for sale, and no outside party can say what is in it or pull their own content back out.

Why the crawler problem reaches every site, not just publishers

The detail that matters to a software marketer has nothing to do with paywalls. Brave's own help page says its crawler "does not advertise a differentiated user agent," meaning it does not identify itself the way Googlebot or GPTBot do, as Search Engine Journal reported. Brave's stated reason is that a site blocking everything but Google would also turn away Brave, so Brave instead follows whatever rule a site already sets for Googlebot. Block Google and you block Brave. Allow Google and Brave comes along too, with no separate line you can write for it in robots.txt.

That means any page a marketer has deliberately kept open to Google search is also feeding an index Brave itself describes, per SEJ, as holding "over 30 billion pages, with millions of new pages indexed each day." That index is a paid product sold to five companies building AI answer engines. A pricing page, a comparison post, or a benchmark written to win an organic ranking or an AI Overview citation can end up grounding a competitor's chatbot answer, through a pipeline no one asked the site owner to join and that cannot be switched off alone.

The AI companies named are not new to this arrangement. A 2023 Brave blog post said Anthropic used the Search API to train Claude 2, and Meta's Llama 3 paper cites the same API as a data source, per PPC Land's review of the complaint. Neither use required a license from any website whose pages ended up in the index — the deal was struck between Brave and the AI company, not between the AI company and the sites that were crawled.

What a software marketer should do now

Nothing here is fixable by editing a text file. The honest first step is to see what is already out there, then decide which content is worth protecting and which is not.

• Search "site:" plus your domain at search.brave.com to see what Brave has stored. One SEJ test turned up a page's cached description from earlier the same day, confirming Brave serves a stored copy, not a live fetch.
• Remember noindex is the only lever Brave offers, and it removes the page from Google too. There is no setting that keeps a page in Google's results while pulling it out of Brave's resold index.
• Stop treating AI visibility and search visibility as separable decisions for any page where you'd want one but not the other. Right now, with this crawler, you cannot have it both ways.