They claim independence but they still don't have a user agent that has been seen in server logs. Last time I looked they use a browser user agent and follow Googlebot rules in robots.txt. Which is understandable because some webmasters use a whitelist approach to bots given how many there are, and you wouldn't want your search quality to hurt because e.g. Facebook blocks you. And a lot of their results correlate with Google's based on their historical Cliqz data.

Not that I'm against Brave in any way, I think any alternative to Google's dominance is healthy. It just seems the touting of privacy, independence etc from alt search engines often has very loose meanings on those words, or sometimes comes across as god of the gaps platitudes.