{"id":264423,"date":"2025-07-14T14:22:21","date_gmt":"2025-07-14T14:22:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/264423\/"},"modified":"2025-07-14T14:22:21","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T14:22:21","slug":"what-perplexitys-openais-browsers-mean-for-their-ad-ambitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/264423\/","title":{"rendered":"What Perplexity’s, OpenAI’s browsers mean for their ad ambitions"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI platform<\/a> wars are about to become the browser wars and advertising will be a key battleground.<\/p>\n

OpenAI and Perplexity, two of the biggest players in alternative AI, are making browsers central to their next act. It\u2019s a natural, albeit seminal, move for both companies \u2014 one that will have major implications for how advertising is sold, served and measured in an AI-first internet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But before the speculation takes off, here\u2019s what\u2019s real. First, Perplexity launched its browser, Comet, last week to subscribers of its $200 per month Max plan and a handful of investors. Then OpenAI\u2019s own plan for a browser was revealed by Reuters<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOwning the browser itself is one way of securing the place of your search product, and all the benefits that go with that (including to your ads business),\u201d said Niamh Burns, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. \u201cAnd the data advantages are huge when you have that kind of access to a user\u2019s journey.\u201d<\/p>\n

For AI platforms, building a browser isn\u2019t just about controlling the user experience \u2013 it\u2019s about opening the data exhaust. Every scroll, click and query in the browser becomes raw material for training their models. That behavioral feedback loop is what gives these platforms an edge in building more responsive, more personalized AI systems.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Add advertising to that structure and the flywheel only spins faster. The more the browser knows the more predictive the model becomes \u2013 and the more attractive the ad product looks to marketers searching for new alternatives to the status quo. In fact, some marketers, already frustrated by the leverage wielded by the most dominant ad platforms, seem more than ready to embrace alternatives<\/a> \u2014 as long as they work.<\/p>\n

To them, more platforms means more negotiating power. For AI companies, it\u2019s a land grab \u2014 but also a clear path to profitability. Indeed, advertising remains one of the few high-margin, scalable business models that can sit natively atop an AI product.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFor these Gen AI businesses such as Perplexity and OpenAI, what they really need and what they\u2019re really after, at least I believe, is the interaction of users with the content,\u201d said J\u00e1nos Moldvay, vp of measurement at Funnel. \u201cGetting the bounce rates, how they scroll \u2013 all of that, which Google has a pretty huge and almost unfair advantage over.<\/p>\n

Still, both companies appear unfazed by the size of the challenge. If anything, they seem to be leaning in. Perplexity has been quietly building out its own ad offering<\/a> for months. OpenAI recently hired Fidji Simo \u2013 a former architect of Meta\u2019s ads business and more recently Instacart CEO \u2013 to lead its applications group.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhether that\u2019s training large language models (LLMs), anonymizing it, using it to develop synthetic data that can then better allow agencies and brands to target. There\u2019s a lot of potential,\u201d said Nicole Greene, vp, analyst, research and advisory at Gartner.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For better or worse, much of that potential hinges on a more fundamental shift: what happens when the internet starts to move from pages to answers? Its still too early to map the full fallout but the trend line is clear: an internet where the answer \u2013 not the source \u2013 becomes the primary unit of value. That erosion is already visible in Google\u2019s AI Overviews where citations exist but frequently don\u2019t command the click-through they once did. As more Gen AI-native browsers emerge, the effect will only deepen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a fundamental shift in how users will interact with online content,\u201d said Debra Aho Williamson, founder and chief analyst at Sonata Insights. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t mean there will be no advertising. In my experience, a CEO doesn\u2019t drop a major hint like that without having a different or better idea in mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s referring to recent comments from Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, who positioned the company\u2019s browser as a vector for how the chat experience becomes the new gravitational center of the internet. As it expands to touch more digital experiences, the rest of the web, including advertising, will begin to conform to its shape.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how: let\u2019s say someone wants to know what to do in London this weekend. In the past, a Google search would return a list of sites. The user would scroll through pages, open a\u00a0 few tabs and cobble together a plan. In the AI-powered version, the browser surfaces a curated answer \u2013 personalized, conversation and dynamic. Want more detail? Ask. Prefer alternatives? They appear.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just a new way to browse. It\u2019s a fundamentally different way of decoding what\u2019s worth seeing and who gets seen at all. And increasingly, more people are already doing it. Generative AI users are expected to reach 160 million in the U.S. by 2029, according to eMarketer. That\u2019s more than half of all internet users and nearly half the U.S. population<\/p>\n

But building a browser today looks very different than when Google launched Chrome in 2008. A thicket of regulation around data privacy and platform looms large.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, EU antitrust regulators were urged to investigate whether Google\u2019s integration of generative AI into Chrome is doing irreparable harm to publishers. Next month, a U.S. federal judge could rule that Google must offer website owners and YouTube creators an \u201ceasily usable mechanism\u201d to opt out of having their content used to train its AI products.<\/p>\n

Whether moves like these will create meaningful guardrails around generative AI is still an open question. But what\u2019s already clear is this: there are powerful forces in the industry that would prefer those guardrails remain theoretical; \u2014 or delayed long enough to be irrelevant.<\/p>\n

This is the terrain OpenAI and Perplexity are entering \u2013 competitive, chaotic and already under scrutiny. But for now, the logic is clear: own the interface, control the signal and reshape the economics.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Responding to this article, Perplexity\u2019s head of communications, Jesse Dwyer told Digiday: \u201cIf users lose this browser war, it will be from a familiar playbook \u2013 a monopolistic \u2018everything company\u2019 forcing their model on everyone. In this sense, OpenAI\u2019s offering will not differ from Chrome\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n

OpenAI did not respond to Digiday\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI platform wars are about to become the browser wars and advertising will be a key battleground. OpenAI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264424,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,101062,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-264423","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-marketing-on-platforms","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114852039450276274","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}