How Agentic Browsers Will Change Digital Marketing

The footprint of large language models keeps expanding. You see it in productivity suites, CRM, ERP, and now in the browser itself. When the browser thinks and acts, the surface you optimize for changes. That has consequences for how people find, decide, and buy.

Microsoft shows how quickly this footprint can spread across daily work. Microsoft says nearly 70% of the Fortune 500 now use Microsoft 365 Copilot. The company also reports momentum through 2025 customer stories and events. These numbers do not represent unique daily users across every product; rather, they signal reach into large enterprises where Microsoft already has distribution.

Google is pushing Gemini across Search, Workspace, and Cloud. Google highlights Gemini inside Search’s AI Mode and AI Overviews, and claims billions of monthly AI assists across Workspace. Google also points to customers putting Gemini to work across industries and reports average time savings in Workspace studies. In education, Google says Gemini for Education now reaches more than 10 million U.S. college students.

Salesforce and SAP are bringing agents into core enterprise flows. Salesforce announced Agentforce and the Agentic Enterprise, with updates in 2025 that focus on visibility and control for scaled agent deployments. SAP positioned Joule as its AI copilot and added collaborative AI agents across business processes at TechEd 2024, with ongoing releases in 2025.

And with all of that as the backdrop, should we be surprised that the browser is the next layer?

Image Credit: Duane Forrester

What Is An Agentic Browser?

A traditional browser shows you pages and links. An agentic browser interprets the page, carries context, and can act on your behalf. It can read, synthesize, click, fill forms, and complete tasks. You ask for an outcome. It gets you there.

Perplexity’s Comet positions itself as an AI-first browser that works for you. Reuters covered its launch and the pitch to challenge Chrome’s dominance, and The Verge reports that Comet is now available to everyone for free, after a staged rollout.

Security has already surfaced as a real issue for agentic browsers. Brave’s research describes indirect prompt injection in Comet and Guardio’s work, and coverage in the trade press highlights risks of agent-led flows being manipulated.

Now OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Atlas, a browser with ChatGPT at the core and an Agent Mode for task execution.

Why This Matters To Marketing

If the browser acts, people click less and complete more tasks in place. That compresses discovery and decision steps. It raises the bar for how your content gets selected, summarized, and executed against. Martech’s analysis points to a redefined search and discovery experience when browsers bring agentic and conversational layers to the fore.

You should expect four big shifts.

Search And Discovery

Agentic flows reduce list-based searching. The agent decides which sources to read, how to synthesize, and what to do with the result. Your goal shifts from ranking to getting selected by an agent that is optimizing for the user’s preferences and constraints. That may lower raw click volumes and raise the value of being the canonical source for a clear, task-oriented answer.

Content And Experience

Content needs to be agent-friendly. That means clear structure, strong headings, accurate metadata, concise summaries, and explicit steps. You are writing for two audiences. The human who skims. The agent that must parse, validate, and act. You also need task artifacts. Checklists. How to flows. Short-form answers that are safe to act on. If your page is the long version, your agent-friendly artifact is the short version. Both matter.

CRM And First-Party Data

Agents may mediate more of the journey. You need earlier value exchanges to earn consent. You need clean APIs and structured data so agents can hand off context, initiate sessions, and trigger next best actions. You will also need to model events differently when some actions never hit your pages.

Attribution And Measurement

If an agent fills the cart or completes a form from the browser, you will not see traditional click paths. Define agent-mediated events. Track handoffs between browser agent and brand systems. Update your models so agent exposure and agent action can be credited. This is the same lesson marketers learned with assistants and chat surfaces. The browser now brings that dynamic to the mainstream.

What To Do Now

Start With Content

Audit your top 10 discovery and consideration assets. Tighten structure. Add short summaries and task snippets that an agent can lift safely. Add schema markup where it makes sense. Make dates and facts explicit. Your goal is clarity that a machine can parse and that a person can trust. Guidance on why this matters sits in the information above from the Martech article.

Build Better Machine Signals

Use schema.org where it helps understanding. Ensure feeds, sitemaps, Open Graph, and product data are complete and current. If you have APIs that expose inventory, pricing, appointments, or availability, document them clearly and make developer access straightforward.

Map Agent-First Journeys

Draft a simple flow for how your category works when the browser is the assistant. Query. Synthesis. Selection. Action. Handoff. Conversion. Then decide where you can add value. This is not only about SEO. It is about being callable by an agent to help someone finish a task with less friction.

Rethink Metrics

Define what counts as an agent impression and an agent conversion for your brand. Tag flows where the agent initiates the session. Set targets for assisted conversions that originate in agent environments. Treat this as a separate channel for planning.

Run Small Tests

Try optimizing one or two pages for agent selection and summarize ability. Instrument the flows. If there are early integrations or pilots available with agent browsers, get on the list and learn fast. For competitive context, it is useful to watch how quickly Atlas and Comet gain traction relative to incumbent browsers. Sources on current market share are below.

Why Timing Matters

We have seen how fast browsers can grow when they meet a new need. Google launched Chrome in 2008. Within a year, it was already climbing the charts. Ars Technica covered Chrome’s 1.0 release on December 11, 2008. StatCounter Press said Chrome exceeded 20% worldwide in June 2011, up from 2.8% in June 2009. By May 2012, StatCounter reported Chrome overtook Internet Explorer for the first full month. Annual StatCounter data for 2012 shows Chrome at 31.42%, Internet Explorer at 26.47%, and Firefox at 18.88%.

Firefox had its own rapid start earlier in the 2000s. Mozilla announced 50 million Firefox downloads in April 2005 and 100 million by October 2005, less than a year after 1.0. Contemporary reporting placed Firefox at roughly 9 to 10% market share by late 2005 and 18% by mid-2008.

Microsoft Edge entered later. Edge originally shipped in 2015, then relaunched on Chromium in January 2020. Edge has fluctuated. Recent coverage says Edge lost share over the summer of 2025 on desktop, citing StatCounter.

For an executive snapshot of the current landscape, StatCounter’s September 2025 worldwide totals show Chrome at about 71.8%, Safari at about 13.9%, Edge at about 4.7%, Firefox at about 2.2%, Samsung Internet at about 1.9%, and Opera at about 1.7%.

What This History Tells Us

Each major browser shift came with a clear promise. Netscape made the web accessible. Internet Explorer bundled it with the operating system. Firefox made it safer and more private. Chrome made it faster and more reliable. Every breakthrough paired capability with trust. That pattern will repeat here.

Agentic browsers can only scale if they prove both utility and safety. They must handle tasks faster and more accurately than people, without introducing new risks. Security research around Comet shows what happens when that balance tips the wrong way. If users see agentic browsing as unpredictable or unsafe, adoption slows. If it saves them time and feels dependable, adoption accelerates. History shows that trust, not novelty, drives the curves that turn experiments into standards.

For marketers, that means your work will increasingly live inside systems where trust and clarity are prerequisites. Agents will need unambiguous facts, consistent markup, and licensing that spells out how your content can be reused. Brands that make that easy will be indexed, quoted, and recommended. Brands that make it hard will vanish from the new surface before they even know it exists.

How To Position Your Brand For Agentic Browsing

Keep your approach simple and disciplined. Make your best content easy to select, summarize, and act on. Structure it tightly, keep data fresh, and ensure everything you publish can stand on its own when pulled out of context. Give agents clean, accurate snippets they can carry forward without risk of misrepresentation.

Expose the data and signals that let agents work with you. APIs, feeds, and machine-readable product information reduce guesswork. If agents can confirm availability, pricing, or location from a trusted feed, your brand becomes a reliable component in the user’s automated flow. Pair that with clear permissions on how your data can be displayed or executed, so platforms have a reason to include you without fear of legal exposure.

Treat agent-mediated activity as its own marketing channel. Name it. Measure it. Fund it. You are early, so your metrics will change as you learn, but the act of measuring will force better questions about what visibility and conversion mean when browsers complete tasks for users. The first teams to formalize this channel will understand its economics long before competitors notice the traffic shift.

Finally, stay close to the platform evolution. Watch every release of OpenAI’s Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet. Track Google’s response as it blends Gemini deeper into Chrome and Search. The pace will feel familiar (like the late 2000s browser race), but the consequences will be larger. When the browser becomes an agent, it doesn’t just display the web; it intermediates it. Every business that relies on discovery, trust, or conversion will feel that change.

The Takeaway

Agentic browsers will not replace marketing, but they will reshape how attention, trust, and action flow online. The winners will be brands that think like system integrators (clear data, structured content, and dependable facts) because those are the materials agents build with. This is the early moment before the inflection point, the time to experiment while risk is low and visibility is still yours to claim.

History shows that when browsers evolve, the web follows. This time, the web won’t just render pages. It will think, decide, and act. Your job is to make sure that when it does, it acts in your favor.

Looking ahead, even a modest 10 to 15% adoption rate for agentic browsers within three years would represent one of the fastest paradigm shifts since Chrome’s launch. For marketers, that scale means the agent layer will become a measurable channel, and every optimization choice made now – how your data is structured, how your content is summarized, how trust is signaled – will compound its impact later.

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This post was originally published on Duane Forrester Decodes.

Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock