What is Safe Search?
Brave Search will not return results relating to content that has been flagged as unlawful. However, there is an optional facility in Brave Search, Safe Search, that filters explicit, adult, or potentially inappropriate content from search results.
There are three settings: Off, Moderate (the default), and Strict.
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When Safe Search is set to
Strict, users will only see family-friendly results, protecting users - particularly younger audiences - from explicit content. There will be no links nor images that relate to adult context. -
When Safe Search is set to
Moderate, in the “All” tab links to adult content may appear, but adult images will not appear. The “Images” tab will show adult images. -
When Safe Search is set to
Off, then images of adult content may appear in the “All” tab.
For both the Off and Moderate settings, Brave Search’s “Answer with AI”
function is disabled for adult content.
The algorithm used to determine adult content is based on a variety of mechanisms, including third-party lists and machine-learning models. However, if you encounter content inappropriate for your Safe Searching setting, please report this via email to search-abuse@brave.com. This allows us to improve our filtering.
Finally, Brave Search does not correlate any user information with your searches.
For Administrators
How to Enforce Safe Search for Brave Search
Brave Search offers a way for administrators or parents to enforce Safe Search at the DNS level. This ensures all searches made through Brave Search on your network automatically default to Safe Search mode.
To enforce Safe Search, modify your DNS records by adding a specific CNAME record
search.brave.com IN CNAME forcesafe.search.brave.com
This setting forces Brave Search to operate only in Safe Search mode on your network.
Important Considerations and Limitations
Be cautious when modifying DNS records. You should only override the
specific domain (search.brave.com) and not create a new DNS zone entirely
for search.brave.com. Doing so would inadvertently override all subdomains,
such as: cdn.search.brave.com or imgs.search.brave.com.
Therefore, you must ensure the DNS change only impacts the main search
domain (search.brave.com) without altering or overriding subdomains.