Worldwide, it's an artificial intelligence-powered way to browse the web

Next-gen browsers are poised to redefine online interaction, challenging Chrome's reign

The web browser, the ubiquitous software enabling access to the internet, has remained unchanged in its core purpose of fetching and displaying online content for decades. That’s now changing as tech giants bring the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to the browser. 

Alphabet’s Google Chrome is by far the top browser, holding more than 70 per cent market share and boasting over 3 billion users. Chrome’s dominance and how people interact with the internet are set to change with the arrival of AI browsers: Perplexity’s Comet and OpenAI’s reported offering. 

Since its public launch in 2008, Chrome has fended off Apple Safari, Firefox, Opera, Microsoft Edge and other browsers. Safari found success in Apple’s privacy-first ecosystem, but it never became a mainstream browser. 

The AI browser market is worth $4.5 billion and it is expected to grow to $76.8 billion by 2034, according to a recent report by Market.US. Such browsers act as an intelligent assistant to users, helping them complete tasks rather than merely displaying websites, said the report. 

Browser power amplified 

“Comet promises to amplify human intelligence by being as fluid as human thought,” according to Perplexity. 

Separately, Sam Altman-led OpenAI is reportedly working on a browser with agentic AI capabilities. Google is integrating Gemini, the company’s AI tool, with Chrome. 

“We are witnessing a fundamental shift in how we interact with the web. For decades, the internet was structured around browsers and search, with Google shaping the entire web experience through the search bar. But, with the rise of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4o and Claude, that paradigm is rapidly evolving,” said Jaspreet Bindra, the co-founder of AI&Beyond. 

Comet monitors user queries across tabs and makes decisions continuously, rather than waiting for commands, according to a report by Creole Studios, an Ahmedabad-based digital transformation consultancy. It understands the context of browsing across tabs, rather than treating each tab in isolation, Creole said in its report comparing Chrome and Comet. 

“The way users enter the internet is no longer through a traditional search bar, but through conversational interfaces that understand intent and return synthesised, context-aware answers, not just links,” Bindra said. 

Google is preparing for competition. The search engine rolled out an AI mode for India earlier this month, offering users advanced reasoning, “multimodality” and the ability to delve deeper with follow-up questions and helpful web links. 

AI mode works by breaking large, complex questions into subtopics and issuing a multitude of queries simultaneously. This enables the search engine to dig deeper and find "hyper-relevant content" that matches the original query. The feature adds to the already existing AI-overview feature the search engine had rolled out in August last year. Both features provide a quick snapshot of the user query in an easy-to-read format, with links to the data sources from which it has been accessed displayed on the side. 

The search engine giant is integrating Gemini, its flagship LLM, with Chrome for some users in the United States. However, that feature is still an add-on and is unlike the Comet browser, which is built from the ground up with AI capabilities, said the Creole report. 

“Comet’s launch isn’t just innovative — it’s timely. The AI boom, market fatigue with traditional browsing, and cracks in Chrome’s dominance have created the perfect storm for disruption,” Creole said, adding that users are becoming more comfortable prompting, delegating, and co-creating with AI. Search behaviour is changing from keywords to natural language and task-based requests. 

Why another browser 

But do we need a new browser if existing ones are integrating AI? 

Comet will be free but agentic search and personal or memory searches might be either rate-limited or exclusive to paid users, said Perplexity’s chief executive officer Aravind Srinivas during a recent Ask Me Anything session on Reddit. 

Perplexity Pro, a feature worth ₹17,000 per year, is being offered for free to 360 million Indian users of Bharti Airtel. Perplexity Max costs $200 monthly (around ₹18,000); Chrome is entirely free. 

Comet will need to be integrated with different operating systems, including Windows, to compete with Chrome, experts said.  They believe that in the future browsers, LLMs and search engines will come with powerful AI capabilities that will be able to handle tasks such as adding events to personal calendars, sending emails, or even preparing a brief for the day. 

“What’s also becoming clear is that LLMs themselves are starting to behave like browsers — fetching, summarising, and reasoning over information. In this new paradigm, it’s not Chrome vs. Safari anymore — it’s browsers vs. bots. The future will belong to those who best understand human intent and reduce friction between a question and its answer,” Bindra said. 

Browsers vs bots 

Although LLM-powered AI chatbots are growing rapidly, they are yet to surpass the dominance of search engines. Between April 2023 and March 2024, the top 10 AI-powered chatbots received 30.5 billion visits and the top ten search engines 1.86 trillion, according to a report by OneLittleWeb. 

A year later, between April 2024 and March 2025, traffic to top 10 AI bots surged to 55.2 billion, marking an 80.92 per cent increase. Search engine traffic remained largely unchanged. 

“Even in March 2025, daily average visits for search engines reached 5.5 billion, while chatbots only saw 233.1 million — creating an almost 24X gap in user engagement. Despite the rapid growth of AI chatbots, search engines remain far ahead in terms of daily traffic and overall usage,” OneLittleWeb said.