Hi Brave team,
We’re experiencing a strange issue: our website https://minestrator.com is completely absent from Brave Search results. It does not appear for its name nor for any relevant keywords, while it ranks properly on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others.
We’ve submitted multiple indexing requests via https://search.brave.com/submit over the past weeks, but nothing has changed. The site remains invisible on Brave Search, despite being a legitimate business with a clean SEO footprint and no indexing issues elsewhere.
Details:
- Website: https://minestrator.com
- Issue: Not indexed at all on Brave Search
- Other search engines: Fully indexed and ranked
- Actions taken: Repeated submissions via Brave’s indexing form, verified site health and robots.txt
We’d appreciate any insight into why our domain might be excluded, or if there’s a manual review needed to get it listed.
Thanks for your help!
Hello! Thanks for reaching out. It looks like it’s being indexed now based on my most recent search attempt. Please let me know if you experience the same. Thanks!
Hi!
Yes, it seems the site does appear on your end although I noticed the favicon is still the old one from nearly 4 years ago, which is a bit odd (lmao).
However, from France, the situation is quite different. As you can see in the attached search, there’s no trace of the site at all even after going through multiple result pages. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do on my side.
@OctoGency shows up for me. Might just be based on your region and all as it fetches. For example, my search below is for All Regions.
If I switch it up to say only to focus on France, then it changes.
Guess key idea is it does show, but I get where you are saying it should align more especially if it’s on France for the search region since Minstrator is based in France. So results aren’t matching up as well as they should within regions.
cc: @Evan123
Update:
We’ve identified the root cause of the issue it was due to a Cloudflare rule that was unintentionally blocking the Bravebot.
The site now appears to be indexed correctly again.
However, we couldn’t find any official documentation listing Bravebot’s IP ranges, AS numbers, or even a definitive user-agent name to allow proper whitelisting. This made the troubleshooting process longer and more complicated than it needed to be.
If anyone else runs into a similar issue, it’s worth checking your firewall or WAF rules (especially on Cloudflare). Also, it might be helpful for Brave to publish technical documentation or guidelines on how to properly identify and allow Bravebot, just like other major crawlers do.
Hope this helps others in the future!
Yeah, no such thing exists. Not sure if you saw https://search.brave.com/help/brave-search-crawler but I’ll quote section below:
The Brave Search crawler does not advertise a differentiated user agent because we must avoid discrimination from websites that allow only Google to crawl them. However, if a domain or page is not crawlable by Googlebot, then Brave Search’s bot will not crawl it either.
