Brave Browser just passed 100 million monthly active users in September 2025—and every single one of them is invisible to your Google Analytics. That’s not a bug. It’s by design. Brave blocks GA4’s tracking script by default, using the EasyPrivacy filter list to prevent google-analytics.com from ever loading. Your traffic is real. Your data is missing.

For WordPress store owners, this isn’t just a curiosity—it’s an increasingly significant blind spot. Brave holds roughly 1.5-3% of browser market share depending on region, with North America seeing higher adoption. When combined with the 31.5% of users running traditional ad blockers (GWI, 2024), you’re potentially blind to over a third of your actual site visitors.

How Brave Blocks GA4: The Technical Reality#

Brave doesn’t just block cookies. It blocks the GA4 JavaScript library from loading entirely. When a user visits your WordPress site on Brave, the browser checks the request against its filter lists before allowing any network connection. The domain google-analytics.com is on the EasyPrivacy list—so the request is blocked upstream.

What this means in practice: your gtag.js never downloads. Your GA4 tag never fires. No pageview, no events, no conversions. The user has a completely normal experience on your site—adding products to cart, completing checkout, browsing pages—and you have zero visibility into any of it.

Brave’s own documentation confirms this: “By default, the Brave browser blocks third-party tracking including Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and other third-party reporting and measurement vendors.” This isn’t a bug or aggressive setting—it’s the standard out-of-box experience for every Brave user.

The Growth Trajectory You Can’t Ignore#

In 2019, Brave had 6 million monthly users. By 2021, it reached 50 million. In September 2025, it officially joined the ranks of browsers costing you significant ad tracking data by passing 100 million monthly active users—with 42 million of those using it daily.

That’s a 16x growth rate over six years, averaging 2.5 million net new users every month for the past two years.

The EU’s Digital Markets Act accelerated this further. When iOS 17.4 gave European users a browser choice screen, Brave daily installs on iOS jumped 50%. Privacy-conscious users are actively seeking alternatives to Chrome and Safari, and Brave is positioned to catch them.

Brave’s current market position:

• 1-1.5% global browser market share—but concentrated among privacy-focused demographics likely to have higher intent
• ~3% market share in North America—your US customers are more likely to use Brave than the global average
• 42 million daily active users worldwide—a DAU/MAU ratio of 0.42 indicates strong engagement, not casual usage
• Growing faster than competitors: While Firefox usage declines, Brave continues adding users month over month

Why This Matters More for E-commerce Than Content Sites#

If you run a blog, missing 1-3% of pageview data is annoying but manageable. You can extrapolate trends from the traffic you do see.

If you run a WooCommerce store, missing 1-3% of purchase data breaks everything.

Facebook can’t optimize your ads for conversions it doesn’t see. Google Ads can’t attribute revenue to clicks that never fire conversion events. Your ROAS calculations are based on incomplete data. Your ad budget allocations are based on guesses.

And remember—Brave users aren’t representative of your average visitor. They’re deliberately choosing a privacy-first browser. They skew tech-savvy, higher income, and more likely to make considered purchases. These might be your most valuable customers, and you’re completely blind to their behavior.

The Brave User Profile: Not Who You’d Expect to Ignore#

According to browser statistics, Brave users skew younger and male—27.39% are aged 18-24, and 74.69% are male. But the more relevant insight is behavioral: these are users who actively researched and installed a privacy-focused browser. They don’t just stumble onto websites; they make intentional choices.

For e-commerce, this profile suggests:

• Higher research investment: Brave users are more likely to comparison shop and read reviews before purchasing
• Ad skepticism: They’ve explicitly opted out of tracking-based advertising—your retargeting campaigns won’t reach them anyway
• Technical literacy: They understand what tracking means and have decided against it
• Potential higher value: Privacy-conscious consumers often have higher disposable income and more deliberate purchasing behavior

You can’t retarget these users. You can’t measure their customer journey. You can’t attribute their purchases to your marketing spend. But they’re buying from you—you just don’t know which channel drove them there.

Why Browser-Side Tracking Can’t Be Fixed#

Some sites try workarounds: proxying Google Analytics through their own domain, using first-party cookies, or implementing alternative analytics platforms. These approaches have varying success rates, but they all share the same fundamental limitation: they still require JavaScript to execute in the user’s browser.

Brave is getting smarter. The browser doesn’t just block known tracking domains—it also uses heuristics to identify tracking behavior. Even if you rename your analytics script and serve it from your own domain, Brave may still identify and block it based on behavioral patterns.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: Brave is doing what users asked it to do. These users chose not to be tracked. Any workaround you implement is technically adversarial to your visitors’ expressed preferences. That’s a poor foundation for customer relationships.

The Compound Problem: Brave Plus Everything Else#

Brave’s 100 million users don’t exist in isolation. They’re part of a broader privacy trend:

• 31.5% of users globally run ad blockers (GWI, 2024)—with 129 million of them blocking GA specifically
• Safari’s ITP limits first-party cookies to 7 days—breaking attribution for a third of your mobile visitors
• 40-70% of EU visitors reject cookie consent—and without consent, you can’t track them legally anyway
• Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection blocks third-party tracking by default—another 160+ million users affected

When you add these together, you’re not missing 3% of your data—you’re potentially missing 30-40%. Brave is just one more nail in the coffin of browser-based tracking.

Server-Side Tracking: The Brave-Proof Approach#

There’s exactly one approach that works regardless of what browser your customers use: fire tracking events from your server, not their browser.

When a Brave user visits your WooCommerce store and makes a purchase, your WordPress database knows about it. Your payment processor knows about it. Your order confirmation email system knows about it. The only thing that doesn’t know about it is Google Analytics—because GA4 never gets the chance to load.

Server-side tracking captures the event at the source: your WordPress server. When an order is placed, your server sends the conversion event directly to GA4’s Measurement Protocol, Facebook’s Conversions API, or Google Ads’ enhanced conversions endpoint. No browser required. No JavaScript to block. No filter lists to circumvent.

The data flows from your server to the analytics platform—completely bypassing whatever privacy protections your customer’s browser has enabled.

Why Most WordPress Sites Don’t Have This#

Traditional server-side tracking requires Google Tag Manager Server-Side containers, cloud hosting on Google Cloud or AWS, and significant technical expertise to configure. For most WordPress store owners, that means hiring a developer at $120/hour for 50-100 hours of setup work—then ongoing maintenance costs on top.

This is why the Transmute Engine™ was built as a WordPress-native solution. Instead of running GTM containers on external servers, it captures events directly within WordPress and fires them to your analytics platforms via their server-side APIs. No external infrastructure, no JavaScript dependencies, no browser blocking to worry about.

Plugin-based server-side tracking beats container-based approaches precisely because it works where your data already lives—your WordPress database.

Key Takeaways#

• Brave Browser passed 100 million monthly active users in September 2025. Every one of them is invisible to your GA4 by default—the browser blocks google-analytics.com using EasyPrivacy filter lists.
• Brave users skew privacy-conscious, tech-savvy, and potentially high-value. They’re not casual browsers—they deliberately chose a privacy-first browser, suggesting intentional purchasing behavior.
• Browser-side tracking cannot be “fixed” for Brave users. They’ve explicitly opted out. Any workaround is adversarial to their preferences and may still be detected and blocked.
• Combined with ad blockers and Safari ITP, you may be missing 30-40% of total conversion data. Brave is additive to existing data loss, not a replacement problem.
• Server-side tracking is the only Brave-proof solution. Events fire from your server, not their browser—no JavaScript to block, no filter lists to circumvent.

Frequently Asked Questions#

Stop losing conversion data to privacy-first browsers. See how Transmute Engine captures every purchase—regardless of browser.