I’ve been using Comet, Perplexity’s AI-powered browser, for the past week. Using it to navigate the internet is very similar to any other browser experience, with one major enhancement: the Comet Assistant. It’s a feature that can accomplish web-based tasks independent of you, and I’m quickly becoming convinced it’s the future.

I wrote an extensive review of Comet for The Media Copilot newsletter, but here I’d like to explore the broader implications—not just stemming from Comet, but the whole idea of an AI-powered web browser, because soon we’ll be swimming in them. OpenAI is reportedly about to release its own take on the idea, and certainly Chrome won’t be far behind given Google’s deep push into AI.

Introducing a browsing assistant isn’t just a convenience. It has the potential to fundamentally redefine our relationship with the web. AI browsers like Comet represent the first wave in a sea change, shifting the internet from something we actively navigate to something we delegate tasks to, increasingly trusting AI to act on our behalf. That will present new challenges around privacy and ethics, but also create more opportunities, especially for the media.

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Those old enough to remember web browsers when they didn’t have cookies (which let websites remember you were logged in) or omniboxes (which hard-wired search into the experience) understand how significant those changes were.........

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