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Rumors that OpenAI is set to release a gen AI-powered web browser to rival Alphabet‘s Google Chrome have amped up excitement about the future of search and how AI will fundamentally change how we browse the web.
In this seeming next phase of the internet, search engines won’t just point to information; intelligent agents will find it for us and even act on it.
“This isn’t just about better answers; it’s about redefining the interface between humans and the web,” Ja-Naé Duane, a Brown University faculty member and MIT CISR research fellow, told VentureBeat. “By embedding a conversational, task-completing AI into the browser itself, OpenAI is signaling the end of search as we know it.”
What exactly is gen AI-powered search?
Gen AI-powered search is fundamentally different from traditional search, as it not only fetches the most relevant links in response to a query, but summarizes and directly links to them. Users won’t have to scroll URLs, websites or databases to get the information they need. For enterprises, this means that SEO may eventually become obsolete, so they must fundamentally rethink their online strategy.
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Presumably, OpenAI’s goal is to keep users inside GPT-like interfaces as long as possible. A dedicated browser would allow the company to directly integrate products such as Operator, which handles repetitive browser tasks.
The latter, ultimately, is the future of AI-powered search, experts say: Agents that fetch information for users and get to know their habits, interests and goals.
“We’re moving into an era where the browser doesn’t just respond, it anticipates,” said Duane. “The future of search is not about finding, it’s about fulfilling.”
The current gen AI-powered search landscape
Whenever OpenAI enters the gen AI-powered search space, it will face a slate of competition, including from Perplexity, Dia, Arc, Andi, Bagoodex, Komo You.com and others.
Notably, Perplexity’s Comet was launched earlier this month, but is currently only available to customers on the $200-per-month tier. The company says it will roll out the browser to additional users on an invite-only basis, and eventually make it free.
Perplexity is “excellent for deep research,” noted Wyatt Mayham of Northwest AI Consulting, but its current price tag gears it toward power users, not the mass market.
Perplexity is “fast, task-oriented” and being increasingly adopted in knowledge work, noted Johnny Hughes, co-founder and CMO at marketing and advertising firm Avenue Z. “The issue? Source transparency and trust are still hit or miss,” he said. You.com, Arc and others also have good user interface (UI) experimentation, but “lack scale, funding or core differentiators.”
Dia, meanwhile, as Mayham put it, is “rethinking the browser from scratch with modular AI features, but faces the uphill battle of adoption in a space dominated by incumbents.” And, its intent-sensitive automation is also more constrained.
Incumbents have also taken steps to compete. Chrome has introduced AI Mode and Bing offers Copilot search, while Firefox, DuckDuckGo and others have incorporated AI chatbots and sidebars, as well as integrated AI summaries into search results. Still, these are more conservative and remain closer to traditional assistive search, and are beholden to ad revenue models and legacy UX.
OpenAI’s potential advantage in search
What could set ChatGPT apart from the others is its strong market share, deep industry partnerships — and the fact that it has 500 million weekly active users.
Experts say one advantage is its task-oriented nature.
“Instead of giving you a list of links, their upcoming browser agent aims to complete actions (book a flight, order groceries, handle forms),” said Mayham of Northwest AI Consulting. “That’s a different model than Google’s ad-driven approach and has major implications for how discovery happens online.”
It is indeed a “big shift in mental models,” agreed Hughes of Avenue Z. Google was built to index and rank, while OpenAI is engineered to understand, synthesize and serve intent-based outcomes.
“They’re not trying to ‘crawl the web,’ they’re trying to comprehend it,” he said, emphasizing that today’s users are searching for direct answers, not just links.
OpenAI’s advantage over rivals is its massive developer ecosystem, built-in user behavior via ChatGPT and direct feedback loops from billions of prompts. Where Perplexity functions as a powerful agentic assistant, and Gemini augments search with context and extensions, “OpenAI is positioned to become the OS layer of the internet,” said Hughes.
But can OpenAI really topple Google?
The browser wars have been ongoing for years, and Chrome remains the far-and-away dominant player.
According to marketing intelligence firm Datos, the tech giant maintained a 90.15% share of the U.S. user base and 92.49% in Europe between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025. By contrast, ChatGPT accounted for just 0.29% of desktop events in the U.S. and 0.32% in Europe.
“Short of a miracle, I have a hard time seeing any new browser having any kind of material impact on Google’s browser dominance for quite some time, if at all,” said Eli Goodman, Datos’ CEO and co-founder.
AI tools will show value in areas including summarization, research acceleration and “mitigating tab fatigue,” he said. “But an existential threat to Google? Not yet.”
For AI browsers to truly disrupt the market, they’ll need to prove that their end-to-end experience is not just faster or smarter, but consistently more useful than what users already know, he noted.
ChatGPT is strong at answering well-formed questions using its internal knowledge and language reasoning, but it lacks access to real-time, long-tail and less-indexed web content, said Vladyslav Hamolia, AI product lead at Mac app builder MacPaw.
“This is where a traditional browser-plus-search engine still plays a key role, surfacing newly published pages, live prices, event-specific updates or in-depth technical documentation,” said Hamolia. “The browser is not just a UI layer; it’s a gateway to navigating and filtering a vast, dynamic web that models alone cannot fully absorb.”
Google remains dominant in crawling depth (with two decades of crawling infrastructure), semantic understanding of web structure (sitemaps, structured data) and personalized relevance, he noted.
Brian Jackson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, pointed out that Chrome users also likely use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and other Google platforms. “OpenAI and Perplexity don’t have that same gamut of services.”
However, if their AI agents can begin replacing more Google tools beyond search, they can win some market share.
“We also have to consider what strategy OpenAI and Perplexity take with their browsers,” said Jackson. “Right now, Perplexity makes Comet available only for its paying users, so at the moment, it’s more of an added value to draw in subscribers rather than trying to win browser market share.”
Advantages and disadvantages of AI web browsers
The advantages of AI search may not be truly seen for some time, said Info-Tech’s Jackson.
While Comet touts its ability to summarize and translate every page instantly, that’s not so different from what can be accomplished with Chrome — especially once you consider its extensive library of available extensions.
“These AI browsers will literally be trying to interpret the goal of users,” he said. “They will make suggestions, offer to automate routine tasks, find product comparisons or source multiple quotes for services. “Browsers could transition from being mere windows to web content to agentic assistants that help users achieve their digital goals.”
On the other hand, resistance to new technology is always a factor, he pointed out. Users who reject the AI summaries they see in core search will likely also reject the notion that AI should be at the forefront of browsing.
“The early days of user experience will be important here, and if we see browsers recommending that users put glue on pizza or other silly things like that, it won’t help with adoption,” said Jackson.
Another distinguishing factor with AI search is models’ ability to persist memory across sessions and assist with task execution in-browser.
“The risk, however, is user trust,” said Kaveh Vahdat, founder and president at fractional CMO agency RiseOpp. “A browser that thinks and remembers raises legitimate privacy concerns unless boundaries are clearly defined.”
Moving from static search bars to dynamic AI interfaces that learn, adapt and integrate with internal systems also introduces new exposure points, especially when proprietary data is surfaced by models operating across public and private content, he noted. Enterprises must be prepared to revisit access controls and ensure AI agents align with governance and compliance standards.
“These tools are converging in functionality but diverging in user control,” said Vahdat. “The key differentiator may not be capability, but how well each platform balances autonomy with transparency.”
What enterprises should do now
Whether sooner or later, how should enterprises prepare for a new search environment where SEO is no longer relevant?
Think of your site as a reference point for AI systems, advised Mayham of Northwest AI Consulting. Content should be clear, factual and structured so AI tools can easily surface information. Also, prepare for conversational commerce by ensuring product data and checkout flows are API-friendly and that AI agents can complete transactions without friction.
Additionally, invest in brand authority; if AI cites sources, it’ll use a brand name, not just keywords. “Brand trust is critical,” said Mayham, and is achieved by being featured on other authoritative websites or reviewed well on review platforms.
“Enterprises should stop thinking in blue links and start building content that answers, reasons and resonates,” agreed Avenue Z’s Hughes.
This means:
Structuring content with AI comprehension in mind (schema, embeddings, FAQs)
Prioritizing expert-driven, evergreen content that large language models (LLMs) trust
Diversifying beyond Google (social search, TikTok SEO, YouTube, voice)
Training internal teams on prompt engineering and AI integration
Ultimately, it is critical to make the customer experience interoperable with agentic AI, emphasized Brown University’s Duane.
“Soon, users won’t be browsing; they’ll be delegating,” she said. “You need to prepare your systems not just to be found, but to be understood by AI.”
