Brave Introduces Ask Brave, A Unified AI Search Interface via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Brave is rolling out Ask Brave, a unified search tool that combines AI chat features with regular search results.

It’s accessible on all browsers via the Brave Search homepage.

Ask Brave offers detailed answers, along with interactive elements like videos, webpages, and product listings, all within a single interface.

What’s ‘Ask Brave?’

Ask Brave builds on the company’s existing AI Answers feature, which Brave claims produces over 15 million responses daily.

The initial AI summarization tool was launched in 2023 as “Summarizer,” then renamed “Answer with AI,” and is now called “AI Answers.”

Josep M. Pujol, Chief of Search at Brave, says:

While AI Answers give our users quick summaries, Ask Brave provides longer answers, follow-ups, and a chat mode enhanced with Deep Research, and most importantly, contextually relevant enrichments such as videos, news articles, products, businesses, shopping, and more – in the right place, at the right time. Search makes it possible, LLMs glue it together. We anticipate that Ask Brave will generate millions more daily AI-powered answers with this powerful combination of search and chat, and look forward to deploying more useful AI-powered search tools for our users.

The company positions Ask Brave as a solution to a common frustration: switching between traditional search interfaces and chat tools. You can now access both from one entry point.

Grounded In Search

Brave reports Ask Brave achieves 94.9% accuracy on SimpleQA, using grounding tech with its Search API.

It taps into over 35 billion webpages to base responses on web info, reportedly reducing hallucinations and irrelevant results.

The Deep Research mode issues queries and analyzes thousands of pages to identify and address blind spots, Brave says.

Privacy

Brave affirms that Ask Brave follows its privacy-first policy.

Questions and chats aren’t used for training purposes. Conversations are encrypted, automatically deleted after 24 hours of inactivity, and IP addresses aren’t stored.

How To Use It

There are several ways to access Ask Brave:

• Include double question marks (“??”) in queries when Brave Search is your default engine.
• Click the “Ask” button on search.brave.com.
• Choose the “Ask” tab on search results pages to switch traditional results to chat mode.
• Directly set the homepage to the Ask Brave interface.

Broader Context

Brave claims Brave Search is the third-largest independent global search engine, handling about 1.5 billion monthly queries. The Brave browser reports over 97 million monthly active users worldwide, according to the company.

The launch lands as major search engines continue integrating AI into core experiences. Google has rolled out AI Mode across Search, while Microsoft has integrated Copilot into Bing and Edge.

Brave also offers a Search API that provides real-time data to AI language models.

Featured Image: bangla press/shutterstock

Gemini 2.5 Flash Update: Clearer Answers, Better Image Understanding via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Google updates Gemini 2.5 Flash with clearer step-by-step help, more structured responses, and stronger image understanding, now live in the Gemini app.

• Gemini 2.5 Flash adds step-by-step guidance aimed at homework and complex topics.
• Responses are formatted with headers, lists, and tables for faster scanning.
• Image understanding can explain detailed diagrams and turn notes into flashcards.

Marketing Is 4th Most Exposed To GenAI, Indeed Study Finds via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Marketing professionals face one of the highest levels of potential AI disruption across all occupations, with 69% of marketing job skills positioned for transformation by generative AI, according to new data from Indeed.

The analysis evaluated nearly 2,900 work skills against U.S. job postings and found that marketing is the fourth most exposed profession, trailing only software development, data and analytics, and accounting.

The Shift From Doing To Directing

Indeed’s GenAI Skill Transformation Index groups skills into four levels: minimal, assisted, hybrid, and full transformation.

For marketing professionals, the majority of affected skills fall into hybrid transformation, where AI handles routine execution while humans provide oversight, validation, and strategic direction.

Indeed writes:

“Human oversight will remain critical when applying these skills, but GenAI can already perform a significant portion of routine work.”

That covers tasks AI can complete reliably in standard cases, with people stepping in to manage exceptions, interpret ambiguous situations, and ensure quality control.

What Marketing Skills Are Most at Risk?

Administrative, documentation, and text-processing tasks show high transformation potential, where AI already performs well at information retrieval, drafting, and analysis.

Communication-related work sits in the hybrid zone for many occupations. In one example from the report, communication skills appear in 23% of nursing postings and are classified as “hybrid.” This illustrates how routine language tasks are increasingly AI-assistable while human judgment remains essential.

How the Study Scored Skills

The study used multiple large language models and based its ratings on consistent results from OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4, noting that model performance varies.

The team evaluated each skill on two dimensions: problem-solving requirements and physical necessity. Marketing scores high on problem-solving and low on physical necessity, making many skills strong candidates for AI transformation.

A Change From Previous Research

Earlier Hiring Lab work found zero skills “very likely” to be fully replaced by GenAI.

In this update, the report identifies 19 skills (0.7% of the ~2,900 analyzed) that cross that “very likely” threshold. The authors frame this as incremental progress toward end-to-end automation for narrow, well-structured tasks, not broad replacement.

The Broader Employment Picture

Across the labor market, 26% of jobs on Indeed could be highly transformed by GenAI, 54% are moderately transformed, and 20% show low exposure.

These are measures of potential transformation. Actual outcomes depend on adoption, workflow design, and reskilling.

The report notes:

“Any realized impacts will depend entirely on whether and how businesses adopt and integrate GenAI tools…”

Marketing vs. Other Professions

Software development tops the list with 81% of skills facing transformation, followed by data and analytics (79%) and accounting (74%).

On the other end, nursing shows 33% skill transformation, with core patient-care responsibilities remaining human-centered.

Marketing’s position reflects its reliance on cognitive, screen-based work that AI can increasingly assist.

Not All AI Models Are Equal

The report emphasizes that model choice matters. Different models varied in output quality and stability, so teams should test tools against their own use cases rather than assume uniform performance.

Looking Ahead

The report’s authors, Annina Hering and Arcenis Rojas, created the GenAI Skill Transformation Index to reflect the level of transformation rather than simple replacement.

They advise developing skills that complement AI, such as strategy, creative problem-solving, and the ability to validate and interpret AI-generated outputs.

The timeline for these changes will differ depending on the size of the company, the industry, and how digitally advanced they are.

But the overall trend is clear: roles are evolving from hands-on task execution to overseeing AI and developing strategies. Those who stay ahead by adopting hybrid workflows will likely be in the best position.

Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

SISTRIX Reports Sharp Drop In ChatGPT Web Searches via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

SISTRIX reports that ChatGPT is triggering live web searches far less often for people who use the app without logging in.

In daily spot-checks over the last two weeks, the share of answers that called the web fell from above 15% to below 2.5%. SISTRIX does not assign a cause and notes the observation applies to anonymous sessions.

What Changed

SISTRIX says it “analyses numerous ChatGPT responses to a wide variety of prompts” each day and recently “noticed that ChatGPT uses web searches significantly less frequently.”

It adds that, “at least when using the app without an account,” the measured rate of responses completed via a web search declined sharply in the period reviewed.

SISTRIX doesn’t publish a sample size, list of prompts, or detection method in the post.

SISTRIX also writes that ChatGPT has “traditionally” relied on Bing for web lookups and references rumors of Google data being used, but it doesn’t claim a direct link between any specific backend change and the measured decline.

Related Context

Microsoft Bing Search APIs Retirement

Microsoft announced that the Bing Search APIs were retired on August 11.

Some third-party tools have migrated to alternatives. This doesn’t prove a change inside ChatGPT, but it’s a relevant ecosystem shift.

Google’s SERP Access Changes

SISTRIX separately documented that Google no longer supports the “num=100” parameter and now returns 10 results per request, increasing the effort required to collect SERP data at scale.

Again, this is context rather than causation.

Recent ChatGPT Product Notes

OpenAI’s release notes list “improvements to search in ChatGPT” on September 16, without detailing backend sourcing.

That update may be unrelated to the SISTRIX measurement, but is worth noting in the same timeframe.

Why This Matters

If ChatGPT is consulting the web less frequently in anonymous sessions, you might notice fewer answers citing current sources and a greater reliance on the model’s internal knowledge for those users.

This could influence how often recent news is referenced in responses for users who aren’t logged in, although the behavior may differ for Plus or Enterprise accounts.

Looking Ahead

SISTRIX’s observation is limited to a specific time frame and anonymous usage. Currently, there’s no confirmed information from OpenAI about how frequently ChatGPT performs live lookups overall, and SISTRIX hasn’t provided a reason for the recent drop.

The most cautious conclusion is that one independent measurement showed a sharp short-term decline, which deserves further testing.

Featured Image: matakeris.creative/Shutterstock