Brave (US) · last updated 2026-10-14
Brave Leo
Leo is the AI assistant integrated into the Brave browser, with privacy-first defaults: no account is required and chats are not retained. Brave lists Mixtral, Claude, and Llama among the models available, with no single default model. Less consequential for raw citation share than the major engines, but meaningful for publishers reaching privacy-conscious or developer audiences.
Grounding model
Multiple selectable models with web grounding via Brave Search's independent index. Brave Search has its own crawler and is one of the few non-Bing, non-Google Western indexes operating at scale.
Citation style
Not documented by Brave. We have not verified the source layout.
What it rewards
- Indexing in Brave Search (separate from Google and Bing)
- Clean technical writing and structured data
- Privacy-respecting content patterns
- Recent dates and dating discipline
What it penalizes
- Sites blocked from the Brave Search crawler
- Content without clear citation-worthy claims
- Pages with heavy tracker loads (in our observation, a poor fit for Brave's audience)