The web as we all know it runs on clicks. Billions of them. They gasoline advert income, form search outcomes, and dictate how information is found, monetized, and, at occasions, manipulated. However a brand new wave of AI powered browsers is making an attempt to kill the clicking. They’re coming for Google Chrome.
On Wednesday, the AI search startup Perplexity formally launched Comet, an online browser designed to really feel extra like a dialog than a scroll. Consider it as ChatGPT with a browser tab, however souped as much as deal with your duties, reply complicated questions, navigate context shifts, and fulfill your curiosity .
Perplexity pitches Comet as your “second mind,” able to actively researching, evaluating choices, making purchases, briefing you on your day, and analyzing info in your behalf. The promise is that it does all this with out ever sending you off on a wild hyperlink chase throughout 30 tabs, aiming to break down “complicated workflows into fluid conversations.”
“Agentic AI”
The capabilities of browsers like Comet level to the fast evolution of agentic AI. It is a cutting-edge discipline the place AI techniques are designed not simply to reply questions or generate textual content, however to autonomously carry out a sequence of actions and make choices to attain a person’s said purpose. As a substitute of you telling the browser each single step, an agentic browser goals to know your intent and execute multi-step duties, successfully appearing as an clever assistant inside the net atmosphere. “Comet learns the way you suppose, with a purpose to suppose higher with you,” Perplexity says.
Comet’s launch throws Perplexity into direct confrontation with the most important gatekeeper of the web: Google Chrome. For many years, Chrome has been the dominant gateway, shaping how billions navigate the net. Each question, each click on, each advert. It’s all been filtered by a system constructed to maximise person interplay and, consequently, advert income. Comet is making an attempt to blow that mannequin up, basically difficult the advertising-driven web financial system.
And it’s not alone on this bold assault. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is reportedly getting ready to unveil its personal AI powered net browser as early as subsequent week, in line with Reuters. This device will probably combine the ability of ChatGPT with Operator, OpenAI’s proprietary net agent. Launched as a analysis preview in January 2025, OpenAI’s Operator is an AI agent able to autonomously performing duties by net browser interactions. It leverages OpenAI’s superior fashions to navigate web sites, fill out kinds, place orders, and handle different repetitive browser-based duties.
Operator is designed to “look” at net pages like a human, clicking, typing, and scrolling, aiming to finally deal with the “lengthy tail” of digital use circumstances. If built-in totally into an OpenAI browser, it might create a full-stack various to Google Chrome and Google Search in a single decisive transfer. In essence, OpenAI is coming for Google from each ends: the browser interface and the search performance.
Goodbye clicks. Howdy cognition
Perplexity’s pitch is easy and provocative: the net ought to reply to your ideas, not interrupt them. “The web has grow to be humanity’s prolonged thoughts, whereas our instruments for utilizing it stay primitive,” the corporate said in its announcement, advocating for an interface as fluid as human thought itself.
As a substitute of navigating by countless tabs and chasing hyperlinks, Comet guarantees to run on context. You may ask it to check insurance policy. You may ask it to summarize a complicated sentence or immediately discover that jacket you forgot to bookmark. Comet guarantees to “collapse whole workflows” into fluid conversations, turning what was once a dozen clicks right into a single, intuitive immediate.
If that appears like the top of conventional Search Engine Optimization (search engine optimization) and the dying of the acquainted “blue hyperlinks” of search outcomes, that’s as a result of it very effectively could possibly be. AI browsers like Comet don’t simply threaten particular person publishers and their visitors; they immediately threaten the very basis of Google Chrome’s ecosystem and Google Search’s dominance, which depends closely on directing customers to exterior web sites.
Google’s Grip is Slipping
Google Search has already been underneath appreciable strain from AI native upstarts like Perplexity and You.com. Its personal makes an attempt at deeper AI integration, such because the Search Generative Expertise (SGE), have drawn criticism for generally producing “hallucinations” (incorrect info) and awkward summaries. Concurrently, Chrome, Google’s dominant browser, is dealing with its personal identification disaster. It’s caught between making an attempt to protect its huge advert income pipeline and responding to a wave of AI powered alternate options that don’t depend on conventional hyperlinks or clicks to ship helpful info.
Comet doesn’t simply sidestep the outdated advert pushed mannequin, it basically breaks it. There’s no must type by 10 blue hyperlinks. No must open 12 tabs to check specs, costs, or person critiques. With Comet, you simply ask, and let the browser do the work.
OpenAI’s upcoming browser might deepen that transformative shift even additional. Whether it is certainly designed to maintain person interactions largely inside a ChatGPT-like interface as an alternative of linking out, it might successfully create a completely new, self-contained info ecosystem. In such a future, Google Chrome would not be the indispensable gateway for information or commerce.
What’s at Stake: Redefining the Web
If Comet or OpenAI’s browser succeed, the influence received’t be restricted to simply disrupting search. They’ll basically redefine how the complete web works. Publishers, advertisers, on-line retailers, and even conventional software program corporations might discover themselves disintermediated—that means their direct connection to customers is bypassed—by AI brokers. These clever brokers might summarize their content material, evaluate their costs, execute their duties, and fully bypass their present web sites and interfaces.
It’s a brand new, high-stakes entrance within the warfare for a way people work together with info and conduct their digital lives. The AI browser is not a hypothetical idea. It’s right here.
