Just a few days ago, two major artificial intelligence (AI) companies, OpenAI and Perplexity, opened their internet browsers to the public. With this, there is analysis that a new turn has come in ‘web browsing’, which has long been a monopoly of Google.
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Through new browsers with AI, companies are trying to understand users' online behavior, interests, habits, and temperament and show results accordingly.
OpenEye, which claims to have about 700 million weekly and about 20 million daily users, has currently made its browser ‘ChatGPT Atlas’ available to Apple users. Similarly, Perplexity, which has about 2 million daily users, also made its browser ‘Comet’ publicly available in October. Microsoft has returned its browser ‘Edge’ to the market competition with the help of ChatGPT. Not only this, Arch Max, Anthropic, Opera, The Browser Company, etc. have created browsers with AI features.
Alphabet (Google), which has been ruling the browser and search engine market for a decade, considers ‘Chrome’ as the mainstay of its business. More than two-thirds of the browsers in use worldwide use the Chrome browser. Its number of users is believed to be about 3.5 billion. It is said that Google pays billions of dollars just to be the default on ‘Safari’, which is in second place in the browser market. This also shows how important the browser business is to Alphabet.
With the rise of generative AI in 2022, search engines and browsers have also changed. Browsers that previously provided a list of links in response to questions asked by users have now started to answer users' queries 'to the point', some even act as agents for the user. There is a competition to make which browser is 'smart' with the help of AI. For example, users can instruct their internet browser to book a hotel or flight for travel or send an email. AI will do that job.
New browsers like Perplexity's 'Comet' and Opera's 'Neon' have started doing the user's work themselves. The arrival of new browsers is expected to affect Google's search and advertising business. It is expected that Google's billion-dollar advertising business will be affected after the ads and sponsored content that appear on the search page will stop appearing. However, Google also seems to be preparing itself for the competition from AI browsers. The company is integrating its AI model Gemini into Chrome. OpenAI's Atlas and Perplexity's Comet are built on Google's own Chromium system to avoid technical complexity, so Google is also confident that its browsers will be built on it.
