Brave Search will route result clicks through its own redirect
Brave Search will send result clicks through a redirect on its own domain to deter scrapers. Pages should open as usual, but copied links will point to the redirect, not the destination.
Brave Search will soon send result clicks through a redirect on Brave's own domain before the page opens. Brave says the search and click experience stays the same, and that it still cannot see which result you chose.
The change is a response to scrapers. Google recently began routing its search clicks through its own redirect, and automated services that collect results in bulk moved to Brave Search. Brave reports traffic spikes of several thousand requests per second. It says this forced stricter bot checks, which led to slower results and more CAPTCHAs for ordinary users.
Each result link is now encrypted, and each has its own key that only Brave holds. Your browser requests the key for the link you clicked, using a disguised request so Brave cannot tell which link it was. Brave can still see that a link was opened from a given results page, and when. Because each key covers one link, scraping every result becomes costly.
There are trade-offs. A copied link is the redirect, not the destination, and redirects may expire, so do not save them as bookmarks. Attackers could also use the trust in a Brave link for phishing. Brave adds a time limit and a warning page to counter this. If you turn off JavaScript, the private method cannot run, and clicks use a normal redirect that Brave can see.
Developers who need search results in bulk can use the Brave Search API, which is free for personal and hobby use and paid for commercial use.
Source: Brave Blog ↗. This summary is prepared automatically from the official source and may contain mistakes; the source is authoritative.