The evolution of consumer AI and why Perplexity wants Chrome
The B in B2C will start with..Browser
First things first: Google needs to swiftly* sell Chrome due to ongoing regulatory and antitrust action in the US.
Secondly: Chrome has many suitors - right from Perplexity to search.com to even OpenAI (they haven’t made a formal bid yet).
Perplexity AI made an unsolicited $34.5 billion bid to acquire Google Chrome. For the context: Perplexity’s revenue was $34mn last year (is expected to be around $100-150mn this year) and is valued at $20Bn (as of Aug 2025) - i.e. they want to acquire a product which is way bigger than the size of the company.
Reminds me of the famous quote :
It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of fight in the dog.
The most obvious reason is the access to billions of users. Chrome leads the browser market with over 3 billion users. Acquiring Chrome would give Perplexity direct access to this vast user base and their search traffic, i.e. distribution.
But that’s not the real deal, IMHO.
The real deal is the evolution of consumer AI and why browsers will play a bigger role in the agentic world.
The B in B2C will start with..Browser
Gen AI will transition from conversation to commerce and browsers will play a huge role in this. It’s all about controlling the transactional gateway for consumer AI as the industry shifts from chat-based information retrieval (i.e. knowledge) to frictionless, automated agentic-led transactions.
For example - you can just tell the assistant to book flight tickets, book cabs for the airport - all this without ‘typing or doing anything’. And the ones who have your browsing history, credit card details, store login details stand to win - massively.
The Evolution of Consumer AI
Chatbots → Agentic AI:
Consumer AI tools (like chatbots) are mostly informational—answerings questions, or recommending products (better than blue links, but no call-to-action yet).
The next leap is “agentic AI,” where bots don’t just respond; they transact.
For example, Google’s Shop with AI mode offers “agentic checkout,” tracking deals and completing purchases automatically.
Our new AI Mode shopping experience brings together Gemini capabilities with our Shopping Graph to help you browse for inspiration, think through considerations and narrow down products. The Shopping Graph now has more than 50 billion product listings, from global retailers to local mom and pop shops, each with details like reviews, prices, color options and availability. And you know you’re getting fresh and accurate information you can trust, because every hour more than 2 billion of those product listings are refreshed on Google.
From discovery to delivery
Modern consumer AI can now interact across discovery, recommendation, price tracking, checkout, and fulfilment—turning every user query into a potential transaction and closing the loop far more efficiently than traditional web interfaces.
An agentic browser will:
Control Over User Context: AI needs context—browsing history, session data, shopping habits—to predict and drive transactions. Chrome holds this data at scale (across both desktop + mobile).
Own the Transactional Gateway: As AI moves to “do” things rather than just “say” things—an agent that can book tickets, buy products, handle banking—control of the browser gives Perplexity first-mover advantage to make its AI the user’s default transactional interface, something that the company has been trying to do.
Distribution and Default Power: Most users never change defaults; whosoever controls Chrome, its AI agent becomes the entry point for millions of transactions, not just searches—a leap from discovery to direct action.
Why Perplexity (or even OpenAI) needs Chrome
Perplexity has already launched Comet (I have been using it and well, my take is that it is a bit underwhelming given the hype) which is built on Chromium, the open source version of Chrome.
Perplexity is one of those AI companies that has just raised a lot of money, cracked distribution (Airtel, Paytm, Nothing phone), is building a lot of ‘cool stuff’ (screener for Indian stock market), largely a horizontal play but still has no AI-significant revenue to show ($34mn is big deal for a normal startup - but NOT a BIG deal given that code tools like lovable have set a different benchmark, $100mn in 6 months!)
The horizontal play can only take you so far (others catchup in a few weeks) - Perplexity needs a moat that brings together all it has built and that story will start with a browser + a few billion users.
What’s your take?
*After a landmark court ruling in August 2024, Google was found to have unlawfully monopolized the search market by practices like paying device and browser makers to set Google Search as the default option. As a remedy, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and several states have proposed that Google be required to divest Chrome, which they call a “critical search access point” entrenching Google’s monopoly.
The rationale is that by separating the browser from Google’s search and advertising business, competition in the search ecosystem can be restored, giving consumers genuine choice rather than being funneled through Google’s platform