Brave will soon route Brave Search result clicks through its own redirect at brave.com/go.
You click and land where you expected. Your browser decrypts the target and takes you there directly, while Brave says it never learns which result you chose.
Google forced the move.
After Google started sending its own result clicks through google.com/goto, bulk scrapers that once lived off Google needed a new supplier. They found Brave Search, which runs an independent index, and Brave says traffic spiked by several thousand requests per second.
That load hits humans first.
Servers strain and bot defenses tighten. Brave says real users pay for that with slower results and more CAPTCHAs.
SERP operators already see friction on the Google side. Search Engine Journal reports providers say Google throttles how fast goto links can be followed per page, so some rank trackers now store the redirect instead of the destination URL.
Brave wants a different trade.
Each brave.com/go link carries an encrypted destination with its own key, and only Brave holds the keys. Your browser masks its key request with a random number it alone knows, Brave applies its secret to the masked value, and your browser strips the mask to recover the key for that one link.
The crypto has a name.
It uses a partially oblivious pseudorandom function, oblivious because Brave computes without seeing the question. Brave says it can tell someone opened a link from the hiking boots page, and when, but never which exact link.
That one-to-one design breaks bulk collection.
A person needs one or two keys per page. A scraper feeding chatbots and agents needs every key on every page, and Brave can count those requests per page to make large scale scraping expensive.
Brave frames that as protecting the open web, with a paid front door. Its Search API offers the same results as Brave Search, free for personal and hobby use and paid for commercial use beyond $10 per month in combined credits, Brave says.
There are rough edges.
A copied link is the redirect, not the destination, and Brave warns it can expire and should not serve as a bookmark. Redirects can also be abused for phishing off brave.com trust, which Brave says it counters with repudiation, a time to live, and an interstitial warning.
Privacy also degrades without JavaScript. With no script to run the oblivious exchange, the fallback is a conventional redirect where Brave can see the URL clicked, Brave says.
Brave reads Google as unsentimental. Scrapers once undercut Bing and Brave by reselling cheap Google results, which suited Google, until those same scrapers started feeding OpenAI, Grok, Meta and other AI rivals competing for attention.
If you copy result links into docs or pull SERPs on a schedule, fix that workflow now.
