Brave updates its AI-powered search with a detailed answers feature (techcrunch.com)

Brave rolled out “Ask Brave,” a new long-form answer capability in its AI-powered search suite that sits alongside last year’s AI Answers (summaries). Ask Brave automatically detects when a query merits a deeper response and returns report-style outputs — including links, videos, image carousels and shopping/business enrichments — plus a chat mode for follow-ups, format conversions and extended Deep Research on certain queries. Users can invoke it via the Ask button, the Ask tab on results, or by appending “??” when Brave Search is the default engine. The update underscores a broader shift toward hybrid search+LLM experiences: Brave says it uses its own API to ground results for accuracy and encrypts chats, deleting them after 24 hours of inactivity as a privacy differentiator. Technically, the feature blends retrieval (search grounding and curated enrichments) with generative LLM outputs to produce more context-rich, actionable answers, mirroring competitors like Perplexity and Google’s AI modes. For the AI/ML community this highlights continued focus on grounding, multimodal enrichment, user-invoked chat flows, and privacy-preserving deployments — and signals likely traffic growth as Brave anticipates millions more AI-powered answers daily.