Redefining audience for the age of agents

As AI agents begin handling more of our online activity, media companies face new challenges around access, audiences, and monetization.

Now that OpenAI has pivoted to being a for-profit company, you have to re-examine its many products, including the new ChatGPT-powered browser, Atlas. Upon release, OpenAI seemed very bullish on Atlas, promising versions for Windows and mobile soon. On the other hand, Sam Altman suggested OpenAI’s ultimate destiny wasn’t to be a product company, but the architect of the intelligence powering what others build.

Well, if the point of Atlas is to show what’s possible, mission accomplished. Atlas may not be a better AI browser than Perplexity’s Comet on a technical level, but the idea of coupling your ChatGPT history and memory with a web browser is definitely an unlock. If, while browsing, you happen upon an article related to a chat you had months ago, just find it in the sidebar and suddenly your conversation has that context instantly—no PDFs required.

Regardless of whether or not Atlas is a success, there’s clear utility in AI browsing, and I explore that utility in today’s column. Today also marks Day 1 of the AI course I offer in partnership with The Upgrade—a six-week curriculum meant to transform the work of PR and media professionals with the latest AI tools. If you missed your chance to join, or if year-end schedules and budgets simply got in the way, you’re in luck: my monthly AI Quick Start class is the perfect primer for doing more with AI in 2026, and the one-hour session is happening this Friday, Nov. 7, at 1 p.m. ET.

Check out the details below, feel free to refer a friend, and then let’s talk about what Atlas and context-rich AI browsing means for the web—and for the media.

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Publishers will need to contend with AI agents browsing on behalf of real people. (Credit: Midjourney)

OpenAI’s Atlas and the rise of AI browsing: What it means for media

For over 30 years, the web browser has served as the main gateway for humans to navigate the internet. So it’s only logical that as artificial intelligence becomes more human-like, it would start using that same interface.

That’s essentially the premise behind a new wave of AI-driven browsers, which are having a serious moment following OpenAI’s debut of Atlas—its own browser with ChatGPT built right in as a constant companion. Atlas enters the arena alongside Perplexity’s Comet, which launched this summer and quickly captivated those curious about what AI browsing might look like (guilty). In both cases, users can summon an AI assistant (a.k.a. agent) to execute complex, multi-step tasks, such as navigating to an online grocer and filling your cart with everything you need for a recipe, all from a single command.

Atlas vs. Comet: Which browser is smarter?

So which one delivers the better experience? Based on pure capability, Comet takes the lead. It offers Chrome-style functionality with support for multiple profiles, extensions, and even dedicated buttons for instant AI-powered actions like summarizing pages. However, Atlas has a major edge thanks to ChatGPT, the world’s most-used AI tool with more than 800 million users. When you activate ChatGPT in Atlas, you can directly reference ongoing conversations, and it will recall details from your browsing sessions to assist more effectively.

Still, the Atlas-versus-Comet contest might not even matter, because Google Chrome remains the dominant browser worldwide, commanding about 74% market share. Chrome isn’t standing still either; it now features Gemini, Google’s own AI assistant. Yet that massive user base means Google can’t move as fast. Letting AI agents take control of a browser raises serious security concerns, so Google has kept Gemini in Chrome comparatively limited. If you ask it to shop for you on Amazon, it’ll all but shrug. So Chrome’s continued dominance in the AI era is far from certain.

Will AI browsing actually take off?

But the question of who wins the AI browser battle isn’t as pressing as whether AI browsing itself will take off at all. I’ve been using Comet extensively, and while I love the concept of outsourcing my tedious internet tasks to an agent, I’ve found the set of tasks it can help with to be fairly narrow. In practice, the task needs to be simple, context-light, and not require lengthy prompt engineering. Anything more complex, and you may as well just do it yourself.