Brave hits 51 million daily users, bucking the browser “summer slump”

Summer is usually a slow season for browsers. People are on vacation, kids are out of school, and web usage tends to dip across the board. But it looks like Brave has somehow managed to buck the trend.

The privacy-focused browser just posted its numbers for July 2026, and they’re pretty strong. Brave crossed 122 million monthly active users, and its high-water mark for daily active users climbed to 51.71 million. That’s a new record for the company.

Brave’s CEO Brendan Eich shared the figures on X. In the thread, he wrote that “all browsers see a ‘summer slump,’ but our growth was stronger than past years, in part thanks to the World Cup driving new user growth.” So while other browsers were coasting through the quiet season, Brave was picking up new people.

Apparently, the bump in the numbers came in part from the World Cup. Football fever pulled a lot of curious users toward the browser, and as we reported when Brave neared 121 million monthly users in June, the folks who signed up during the tournament actually stuck around. Retention stayed above average, which matters a lot more than a one-time spike that fizzles out a month later.

Here’s a quick look at the stats for the browser last month:

• Monthly active users: 122.55 million
• High-water mark daily active users: 51.71 million
• 28-day average daily users: 50.10 million
• Daily user-minutes: 6.71 billion

But it’s not just the browser that picked up steam. Brave Search also bagged a whopping 81.61 million daily queries on July 6. Monthly queries, meanwhile, reached 2.46 billion. Around 7.84% of those queries came from people using other browsers, which tells you folks are choosing Brave Search even when they haven’t switched browsers yet.

That last point ties into another bit of news. As we recently covered, Brave Search quietly joined Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo in Chrome’s default search engine picker. So Google is now making it easier for Chrome users to pick a rival, which is a strange but welcome twist.

That said, it’s still a tiny fraction compared to Google Search, which reportedly saw about 417 billion queries a month, at least according to stats reported last year. It’s a remarkable feat nonetheless.

As for the browser, we recently highlighted some big moves there too. The recent v1.93.129 update rolled out with a massive changelog, touching everything from the Leo AI assistant to ad-blocking. And Brave finally added Containers, a feature Firefox users have loved for years, which likely helped win over a few holdouts.

Eich closed the thread with a nod to the people driving the numbers. “Many thanks to our users!” he wrote.

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