The Brave browser is built around privacy. Its Shields feature, switched on by default, blocks ads and trackers, and that includes most analytics scripts. If your reports rely on a script running in the visitor’s browser, many Brave users simply don’t show up.
This isn’t a bug in your setup. It’s how Brave is meant to work. But if you don’t know about it, you may underestimate your traffic, especially from tech-savvy audiences and from Brave Search, whose users are often on the Brave browser.
What Brave blocks
- Analytics scripts. Brave’s filter lists block common analytics tools, including Google Analytics on most sites. Some privacy-friendly tools are blocked too. Results vary by site and by tool, so test yours.
- Third-party cookies and tracking. Cross-site tracking is blocked by default.
- Tracking tags in links. Brave removes many known tracking parameters from URLs. Your
utm_campaign tags may also be removed in some cases, so campaigns can be under-reported even when the script does load. - It looks like Chrome. Brave uses the same user agent as Google Chrome on purpose, so you can’t tell Brave users apart by user agent.
How much traffic goes missing depends on your audience. For a general site it may be a few percent; for a site about technology, privacy or crypto it can be much more.
How to tell if it’s happening to you
Compare two counts for the same week:
- Your analytics tool (counted in the browser).
- Your server logs or hosting stats (counted on the server, every request).
Server-side numbers will always be a bit higher, because they include bots. But if real visits from search.brave.com, or from privacy-focused communities, appear in the logs and not in analytics, Brave’s blocking is a likely cause.
How to count Brave visitors properly
- Count on the server. Anything measured on your server, such as logs, hosting stats or a server-side tracker, sees the request whether or not a script runs.
- Use first-party analytics. Tools that run from your own domain are blocked less often than third-party scripts, though not never.
- Don’t depend on UTM tags alone. For important campaigns, use dedicated landing pages or short paths you can count on the server.
- Read referrers on the server. A visit from Brave Search carries a referrer from
search.brave.com, which your server can record even if the analytics script never loads.
The same blind spot hides AI traffic
AI crawlers and AI fetchers don’t run JavaScript at all, so no script-based analytics tool sees them. And people who arrive from ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity on a privacy browser may be missed too.
That’s why OZMAICO can work on the server side: with the PHP snippet or an access-log upload, it records each visit as it reaches your website, checks AI bots against the IP lists their companies publish, and counts the people who click through from AI assistants. Brave Shields doesn’t hide those visits, because no browser script is involved. (OZMAICO’s JavaScript tag is easier to add, but like any browser script it can be blocked; use the PHP snippet or log upload if you want Brave users counted too.) Read more about measuring traffic from AI assistants, or check a single bot.
Respect the choice
Brave users have chosen not to be tracked. Counting visits on your server is fine; trying to get around Shields to follow individual users isn’t, and may break privacy laws. Count how many people came and which pages they read, not who they are.
More about Brave
- Brave Search SEO: how to show up in Brave’s own index
- Brave’s crawler and your robots.txt
- Brave’s AI answers: how to get cited
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