Ever since news broke of Perplexity releasing its own AI-enabled browser called Comet, there has been more than just whispers about how this barrage of AI-enabled browsers – which started with Microsoft Edge’s Copilot integration – will ultimately impact Google Chrome’s overwhelming dominance in the web browser ecosystem. As far as Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas is concerned, the writing’s all but on the wall – not just for Chrome but Google as a big tech entity, with the advent of AI in reshaping how people access and ultimately consume information on the internet.
In an interview with The Verge, Aravind Srinivas explained how Perplexity’s Comet browser is going to have a more dynamic AI component to it than what we have necessarily seen on other AI-enabled browsers so far. Available to only Perplexity Max subscribers (with an eye-watering $200 monthly cost), the Comet browser is an extension of Perplexity’s core search technology, according to Srinivas, whereby it has a built-in AI assistant directly inside a Chromium-based browser (which is what Comet essentially is).
Also read: Why Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas sees AI browsers as key to AI agents
This assistant lives in a sidebar in Perplexity’s Comet browser, analyzing your browsing context, summarizing information, scheduling meetings, shopping on your behalf, even drafting emails all through natural language prompts. Srinivas argues that this AI integration isn’t just a chatbot slapped onto a search engine, but a rethink of the entire browser experience from an agentic AI perspective. And that’s where he feels Chrome and Google will likely feel difficult to match, largely due to their business model.
According to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, on how integral the AI “sidecar” becomes to the browsing experience going forward, he says, “I feel like it’ll be so intuitive. It’ll almost be like, without the sidecar, why am I using the browser anymore? That’s how it’s going to feel.” The Perplexity CEO is underscoring that traditional URL-by-URL browsing feels increasingly old when AI agents can perform workflows end-to-end. In Comet, a single search box handles all the information seeking queries, navigational lookups, and complex “agent” tasks all at once – this sort of convergence only possible inside an AI-native browser, he claims.
Srinivas also said something more interesting, trying to explain how at a fundamental level Perplexity search is different from Google search, and therefore how Comet AI browser is different from how Google Chrome operates.
Also read: Meet Comet, Perplexity’s new AI browser: How’s it different?
“A lot of people praised the Comet browser because it doesn’t feel like another browser. You know why? One of the main reasons is, of course we have the sidecar and we have the agent and all that, but the default search is Perplexity. And we made it in a way where even if you’re having an intent to navigate, it’ll understand that. It’ll give you four or five links if it feels like it’s a navigational query, it’ll give you images pretty quickly. It’ll give you a very short answer also, so you can combine informational queries or navigational queries, agent queries in one single search box,” says Aravind Srinivas. He further went on to say how that’s only doable if you actually are working on the search problem, which Perplexity has been working on since the last two and a half years.
“Basically, you cannot build a product like Chrome without building Google. Similarly, you cannot build a product like Comet without building Perplexity,” he sums up pretty well.
As browsers embed AI directly into them, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas believes more and more users will bypass Google’s classic search page in favour of in-context answers and automations, eroding Search’s central role that we’ve all taken for granted since the dawn of online search engines (which Google eventually perfected in the late 1990s).
Aravind Srinivas also boldly warns that when users pay per AI prompt (e.g., advanced recruiting or ad-analysis tasks), they won’t generate the click-throughs or ad impressions that fund Google Search – putting its ad-driven revenue model at risk. If complex browser-driven tasks shift to paid AI workflows, Srinivas further suggests, then Google’s primary search monetization could see a steep decline in impressions and clicks.
With the US Department of Justice labelling Google an illegal monopoly last year and pushing for Chrome’s breakup from Google, with more antitrust issues to deal in EU, Google’s search and browser empire is being disrupted by AI companies like Perplexity, OpenAI and others who want to make inroads into this space by reimagining the possibilities of how people search for information and also get things done with increasingly more powerful AI workflows. It’s an idea whose time has come, don’t you feel?
Also read: Edge, Neon, Comet, Arc: Top AI-powered browsers you must try
