Usage metrics refer to information about how a user interacts with a website, and meta-information about the performance of the page itself. For Brave Search, this can include how often a user visits and how long their queries might be (though not the query itself), as well as performance items like whether content loads correctly. By enabling usage metrics, you are allowing Brave to anonymously collect and analyze this kind of information, which in turn helps us improve Brave Search for others.

Brave Search is independent, private and, over time, will offer a more complete view of the voices on the internet. It is also new and, as such, we are still trying to learn how people interact with the site, and about the performance of the site itself. Specifically, we would hope to learn the following:

• Number of daily/weekly/monthly visits
• Number of returning visits
• Number of search queries per day
• Average query length
• What percentage of queries led to a user clicking a search result
• How many users have chosen to leave feedback about Brave Search
• The operating systems people use when they visit (e.g. macOS, Windows, etc)
• The browser you’ve visited from (e.g. Brave, Chrome, Safari, etc)

This data—if you allow us to collect it—is anonymous and only analyzed in aggregate. It will never identify you or the machine you’ve accessed from. The data tells us whether users are indicating the page is useful enough to use again and, in turn, gives us signal that we are approaching a viable alternative to other search engines.