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The browser market is in the middle of its biggest shake-up in years as AI-native browsers push further into territory long dominated by Google Chrome.
Perplexity's Comet browser, which built its pitch around an always-present AI agent that can summarize pages, compare information across tabs, and automate tasks like scheduling and email, has expanded from a $200-a-month subscriber perk to a free product available to anyone. The move came months after Perplexity made an unsolicited, multibillion-dollar all-cash bid to acquire Chrome itself — an offer that surfaced during an active U.S. antitrust case in which a federal judge ultimately ruled Google would not be forced to sell the browser, though it must share certain search data with rivals.
Google, meanwhile, has taken an incremental approach, layering AI features onto Chrome rather than rebuilding it from scratch. Recent additions include a "tab compare" tool, an "Auto Browse" task-automation feature, and a Chrome DevTools MCP integration that lets AI agents debug and test directly inside the browser. A newer WebMCP preview aims to standardize how AI agents interact with actions on websites more broadly.
Other players have entered the space too, including a browser from the team behind Arc and a competing product from OpenAI, underscoring how quickly "agentic browsing" has become a contested front in the broader AI platform race.
Industry analysts say the shift reflects a move away from traditional search toward more personalized, context-aware, and automated ways of finding and acting on information — though some evaluations note today's AI browsers still stumble on complex, multi-step tasks even as they handle simple ones smoothly.
