The Web Discovery Project (WDP) is Brave's open-source, opt-in mechanism for building an independent search index from anonymous signals contributed by users' Brave browsers, rather than from submitted URLs. It matters for AI visibility because Claude's live web search appears to draw on Brave's index, so what WDP discovers shapes what Claude can cite.
There is no submission path: no search console, no sitemap intake, no IndexNow. Per Merj's mid-2026 reading of the WDP source code, a page enters Brave's index through one of two channels. The page channel requires roughly 20 different opted-in users on different networks to visit a URL. Enforced by STAR secret sharing, which keeps the URL undecryptable until the threshold is met. The query channel needs just one opted-in user to view a Google, Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo results page where the URL ranks; the browser anonymously re-fetches that page and reports the listed URLs. So classic search visibility seeds Brave discovery.
Because Brave's own crawler sends no distinctive user agent, a "block all unknown bots" rule can silently exclude it. Making WDP a quiet dependency for anyone who wants to be found by Claude. Being discoverable here is upstream of being cited: it is answer-engine optimisation applied to an index most brands never think about.