Bravebot

Operator

Brave Software, Inc.

Type

Search bot

Official page

search.brave.com

robots.txt token

Bravebot

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to ai.robots.txt.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Search engines

What it does

Bravebot is a web crawler by Brave that indexes pages for Brave Search, providing search data and AI-optimized context to power chatbots, agents, and RAG pipelines.

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: AI Data Providers

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from Bravebot carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Bravebot/1.0; +https://search.brave.com/help/brave-search-crawler) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

Bravebot

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow Bravebot

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: Bravebot
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

How Vireo counts Bravebot

Vireo keeps requests from Bravebot out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under Search engines, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over Bravebot's user agents.

Sources

• Bravebot information page (search.brave.com)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)