Hi, I’ve used Brave Search since their release and been a customer of Proton for a couple of years now.
Recently, I noticed that Brave Search is starting to identify me as a bot more and more when I am connected to Proton VPN NL server. This doesn’t happen when I am using Startpage.
Not sure if this is Brave or Proton’s problem, but is there any way to get more reliability from using both of these two services?
Much appreciated!
It’s likely a false positive. This should not happen with Brave.
What are your browser settings like? Are you always searching on Brave with a new connection and a clean browser with no stored or cached website data?
Also, try changing your VPN location and protocol to Stealth and see if that helps?
What OS are you on?
I’m using Vanadium using its default settings. Changing VPN location sometimes fixes it sometimes doesn’t. The same with changing VPN server within the same country. It’s always a guessing game for me.
Last time I tried Stealth, the speed was cut down more significantly and more websites arent working nicely than with Wireguard. It may change now, so I’ll give that a shot.
So far, only happens on GrapheneOS. Now that I think about it, I dont think this happens on my Mac or Windows 
A little update: This only happens on my GOS Vanadium with Proton VPN on btw. I noticed on my Windows 11 and Mac, I don’t have this issue, granted on both of these OS I am using Brave Browser.
For now, I am using Startpage on Vanadium and it works better. I’ll check if changing to Brave browser on GOS would work better.
I think that’s a good experiment to try out.
If true, it does come off as scummy that Brave Browser is needed to circumvent bot checks on Brave Search on GOS.
Yesterday it didn’t happen at all, but today it just happened again. So I installed Brave on my GOS.
On Brave, it also detected me as a bot, but the difference is that it asks me to prove I am not a bot by doing a slider puzzle.
On Vanadium, I only got this error. Do you know if there is any setting in Vanadium that causes this? Otherwise I’ll ask GOS forum. Thanks!
I also tested tge yesterday. The issue seems to be caused by disabling “Javascript JIT” for the “search.brave.com” domain. After allowing JIT to run on brave search I no longer receive the error as you show above, and instead just recieve the bot slider.
For reference below is the toggle I mentioned
Ah ok, thanks! It indeed works now. Is Javascript JIT disabled by default in Vanadium? If so, do you know why?
According to https://grapheneos.org/features#vanadium it does appear that Javascript JIT is disabled by default now. Quote:
JavaScript JIT disabled by default with per-site toggle via drop-down permission menu
though I believe at the time i switched to Graphene OS this was not the case. You would have to ask the Graphene OS devs if you want more details about Why JIT is disabled by default now.
Got it! Thanks for looking it up 
