The news: The rise of AI browsers like OpenAI’s Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet is setting up a possible bifurcation of the web. These agent-driven browsers navigate pages, click through tasks, and fetch information on a user’s behalf—while traditional browsers like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox still anchor the search-centric behaviors most people rely on.
The divergence could result in further fragmentation where there are two versions of websites—one catering to AI agents and the other focused on human users, per Bloomberg. “You're going to actually want to share very different information on a human version of a site,” said Linda Tong, CEO of web analytics firm Webflow.
For now, the scale of AI browsers is smaller than traditional browsers. Google Chrome alone drives 73.2% of global internet traffic across devices, with Safari at 13.3% and Microsoft Edge at 4.6%, per StatCounter.
Zooming in: Bloomberg found that AI browsers like Atlas and Comet struggle with the modern, human-designed web. They often overthink simple tasks, pause for long stretches, or spiral into loops.
- AI browsers do fine with straightforward actions—summaries, searches, dropping results into documents—but break down when faced with pop-ups, cards, or complex UI elements on websites. In those moments, they fall back on screenshots and optical character recognition (OCR) instead of interpreting the page.
- Bloomberg found that on a Windows laptop, advanced agent features made the machine heat up and its fan spin louder.
System slowdowns and stalled processes could frustrate users who may switch back to traditional browsers.
Why it matters for brands: AI browsers will create parallel discovery paths for humans and agents. Brands that structure their content for both—with product metadata, clear semantic HTML, and agent-ready pages focused on specs, summaries, and FAQs—will have a higher chance of visibility across browsers.
But if AI browsers can’t parse your website content, you fall out of agent-driven comparisons and recommendations, creating a new form of SEO loss.