AI-Native Web Browsers: The Rise of Agentic Browsing and the Challenge to Chrome

AI-native web browsers emerged as one of the defining product categories in web technology during 2025 and 2026. Rather than relying on separate search engines and manually installed extensions, these browsers embed a conversational AI assistant directly into the browsing experience, capable of summarizing pages, comparing information across open tabs, and automating multi-step tasks such as booking appointments or filling out forms.

The category's most prominent early entrant was Comet, launched by the AI search company Perplexity in mid-2025. Comet was built to challenge Google Chrome's long-standing dominance of the browser market — Chrome held roughly two-thirds of global browser market share at the time of Comet's debut. Comet's central feature is an always-present AI agent, positioned in the browser's interface, that can read and summarize page content, compare data across tabs, and carry out agentic tasks like scheduling and email drafting without the user manually navigating each step.

Comet launched as a paid product restricted to Perplexity's higher-priced subscription tier before later expanding to additional subscriber groups and, by October 2025, becoming available for free to all users worldwide.

OpenAI also moved into the browser space around the same period, developing its own AI-integrated browser to compete directly with Chrome. Other established players, including the company behind the Arc browser, released their own AI-native browsers in beta.

Google has incrementally added AI capabilities to Chrome rather than rebuilding the browser around an AI-first interface. Additions through late 2025 and into 2026 included Gemini-powered features, a Google Lens sidebar, a "tab compare" tool, and expanded autofill capabilities covering documents such as passports and driver's licenses. In late 2025, Google introduced Chrome DevTools MCP, allowing AI agents to debug, automate, and test directly within the browser, followed in early 2026 by an "Auto Browse" tool aimed at task automation, and a WebMCP early preview intended to standardize how AI agents interact with website actions.

These additions have generally arrived as integrated features or extensions rather than as a ground-up redesign, a distinction industry observers have used to differentiate Chrome's approach from the agent-first design of newer entrants like Comet.

The rise of AI browsers coincided with an active U.S. antitrust case against Google concerning Chrome's market position. A federal judge ruled that Google would not be required to sell Chrome or Android, though the company was ordered to share certain search data with competitors. Against this backdrop, Perplexity submitted an unsolicited, all-cash offer exceeding $30 billion to acquire Chrome outright — a bid that drew significant attention given Perplexity's far smaller size relative to Google, though it did not result in a sale.

By 2026, AI search and browsing tools had expanded well beyond simple question-answering. Some platforms introduced features allowing a single query to be processed by multiple underlying AI models simultaneously for comparison, along with autonomous agent tools capable of executing multi-step workflows across a range of models, and API products enabling developers to build search-grounded AI applications.

Analysts have characterized the shift as moving beyond a simple faster search engine toward a more personalized, context-aware, and conversational way of finding and acting on information online, though some evaluations have noted that AI browsers still struggle with complex, multi-step tasks compared with simpler queries.