For the past 30 years, the web browser has been the primary way humans navigate the internet. It makes sense, then, that as artificial intelligence becomes more humanlike in its capabilities, it would use the same tool.
That’s basically the idea behind AI-powered browsers, which are definitely having an “it” moment now that OpenAI has launched Atlas, its own web browser that incorporates ChatGPT as an ever-present helper. Atlas follows Perplexity’s Comet, which arrived in the summer to quickly capture the imagination of what an AI browser could do. In both cases, the user can, at any time, call up an AI assistant (aka agent), able to perform multistep tasks—such as navigating to a grocery retailer and filling an online shopping cart with ingredients for a recipe—from a simple command.
Atlas vs. Comet: Who has the smarter browser?
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Who has the better experience? Based on features, the clear winner is Comet, which boasts Chrome-like functionality, supporting multiple user profiles, extensions, and more buttons for specific, fast AI-powered actions, such as instant summarization of web pages. However, because ChatGPT is the go-to AI that over 800 million people now use, that context represents a huge advantage. When you call up the chatbot in Atlas, you can simply point to the relevant conversation, plus it will remember aspects of your browsing experience to better help you.
The Atlas-vs.-Comet fight may be moot, though, since Google Chrome is the incumbent browser for most people (it has 74% market share worldwide), and it has AI features, too. Chrome’s large user base, however, also means Google can’t move as fast: Since the whole idea of AI agents taking control of your browser to perform tasks is fraught with security concerns, Google’s Gemini assistant in Chrome is relatively feeble; if you ask it to, say, shop for you on Amazon, it’ll give you the digital equivalent of a shrug. So Chrome’s continued dominance in the AI era isn’t assured.
But the question of who will win the AI browser war doesn’t matter so much as whether AI browsing will take off at all. I’ve been using Comet heavily for a few months, and although I find the idea of an agent doing all my tedious internet tasks compelling, I’ve found the actual set of things it can do to be quite narrow. Generally, the task needs to be something that doesn’t require a lot of specialized context (since the AI can’t read your mind) or complex prompting (since spending several minutes crafting a prompt is time you could use to just do the task yourself).
Nonetheless, OpenAI imagines a future where most of the activity online is done via AI agents in browsers like Atlas. In its announcement, it says, “This launch marks a step toward a future where most web use happens through agentic systems—where you can delegate the routine and stay focused on what matters most.”
OpenAI could be right. Those narrow use cases for agentic browsing could be expanded greatly with more elegant and comprehensive merging of personal context and the browsing experience. If the agent understands the entire background of what you’re doing—the why—and gets better at navigating the web (as it inevitably will), AI browsing might even burst through to the mainstream.
What agentic browsing means for publishers
If that happens, it would have huge implications for the media. Because not only will people get a lot of their information through the lens of their preferred AI agent, the tasks performed on their behalf will be informed by content seen through that same lens. For example, an agent told to search for a “stylish suit” would need to essentially Google what’s in style, then use that information to complete the task. No human eyeballs ever look at the content it uses to research what’s in style, but getting the right information is a crucial part of the agent performing the task well.
How agents access that information, and what they do with it, are important questions to answer in building the framework of how all this works. The whole area of how AI systems access information is of course hotly contested, generating several lawsuits, but there is some consensus. OpenAI made clear in the launch announcement that it would not use Atlas as a “backdoor” to train on content that was otherwise blocked from its training bot.
However, access for the agent itself is controversial. AI companies maintain that agents are proxies for users, and should, in many cases, be allowed to bypass bot controls to access content and services that a human could access. Others don’t see it that way—that because an agent is a robot, with no human attention to cater to, it should not be treated as human, and sites should have the option to block agents specifically. This is essentially the core of what Perplexity and Cloudflare were arguing about this summer.
With the release of Atlas, AI browsing can only accelerate, and answering these questions will become more urgent. Media strategy depends on knowing who your audience is, understanding how they access your content, and having reliable ways of monetizing that behavior. Right now none of those components are well defined for a future where the primary users of the internet are browser agents.
It’s not just a question of whether sites should be able to block agents specifically. That’s just a building block in creating a system where an agent can work autonomously to either pay or register to access certain content, or prove it has a license to do so. For example, if a subscriber to Fast Company asks their agent to do a task, and in the course of that task needs information the publication can provide, access should be seamless and, importantly, measurable. But if you don’t have a subscription, your agent will be blocked and need to go elsewhere—regardless of whether the actual article is paywalled for humans.
The real power of this idea is in the aggregate, where licensing deals carry over to users of the AI. In the case of OpenAI, which has licensed content from several media companies, that could theoretically carry over to its agents. And since agent activity is measurable, there could theoretically be a way for publications to reach those AI users and turn them into more engaged audience members. It could all be done anonymously, through the AI provider, based on user activity.
When your audience isn’t human
It’s questionable whether most web browsing in the future will be done by bots, but regardless of the proportion, it seems likely that agentic activity on the web will expand significantly, as security concerns are slowly resolved. That means publishers will need to adapt to a world where bots acting on behalf of users become a big part of their audience, and deciding what those agents see and how much they will pay will be critical. The fundamental question in front of us now, however, is figuring out who decides: the people making the content or the people making the agents.
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