It was only a matter of time before Google pulled the trigger: Chrome has been “reimagined with AI.” With that announcement, the browser wars have officially entered the agentic era. On the surface, this sounds like progress: smarter browsing, copilots that fill in the gaps and a promise of efficiency. But brands should be on high alert. The good news is it’s real; the internet is finally changing because the internet sucks. But the bad news for some is that it’s existential.
The Bad News: A Sales Rep in Your Store
Let’s start with the downside because it’s impossible to ignore. Google’s AI-enabled Chrome is, at best, a friendly assistant. At worst, it’s the equivalent of another company planting a sales rep directly inside your store — smiling and helpful as it redirects your customers to competitors.
That is what happens when Chrome “contextualizes” your product page and immediately offers side-by-side comparisons with rival products. You built the experience. You invested in the storytelling. And then Google shows up in the aisle to say, “Have you also considered Viking, Samsung or Frigidaire?” The customer experience you thought you owned gets whitewashed into just another generic feed of options.
For brands, this accelerates a dangerous trend: the erosion of ownership. Every year, brands lose more control over how they engage with consumers. Websites that were supposed to be owned experiences risk becoming dinosaurs, static commoditized destinations in an age where attention is dynamic and personalized. If brands continue to play the same 20-year-old playbook, they will wake up to find the browser itself is now the customer’s true point of contact.
Make no mistake, disruption is coming. Companies will be disrupted at best, industries at worst. Conversation UIs and chat interfaces built into brand sites are no competition alone for browsers armed with AI copilots. Customer acquisition costs will rise. Loyalty will decline. And without direct ownership of your customers’ first-party data, the brand’s ability to create differentiated AI-first marketing systems will evaporate.
The Good News: There’s Still Time
Despite the hype, today’s AI browsers are not yet transformative. They are competent copilots but far from agentic game-changers. They summarize, they reorganize, they compare, but they do not execute tasks end to end. They are about “better thinking” more than “better doing.”
That leaves an opening. The experiences Google is building are powerful, but they are also broad, generic, and at least for now, lacking the specificity industries require. They are not sticky enough to pull users into entirely new behaviors at scale. This is the moment when brands can seize an opportunity.
Instead of ceding ground, brands can innovate where the tech giants cannot: depth, not breadth. A global LLM does not understand the nuanced needs of a traveler booking a trip across three airlines with overlapping loyalty programs or a patient navigating the nightmare of insurance, diagnostics and care coordination. These are industry-specific convergences where a brand can create value far beyond what a generic copilot delivers.
There’s also the potential of generative UI, dynamic interfaces that adapt to customer needs in real time, not just conversational text overlays. Imagine experiences that anticipate gaps before a copilot has the chance to fill them. Imagine convergence plays that combine categories once siloed by outdated technology. That’s the kind of creativity brands must bring to the table if they want to stay relevant.
The Internet Is Shifting, So Must Brands
What we’re watching is not just an upgrade to Chrome. It’s the slow-but-certain rewiring of the internet’s attention economy. And most brands are asleep at the wheel.
We’ve been here before. In 2008, when digital media reshaped publishing, many incumbents shrugged, failed to act and were wiped out. We’re standing at a similar inflection point. Brands can either treat AI browsers as just another channel to “optimize for,” or they can rethink what it means to create customer experiences that are irreplaceable, nuanced and owned.
The good news is Google’s AI browser is not there yet. The bad news is it will be. And when it is, the brands that failed to adapt will find themselves wondering how they lost their customer, their data and their relevance, all while Google, or whoever wins the agentic race, happily collects the spoils.
The question for brands is not whether AI browsers will reshape consumer behavior. They will. The question is: Will you let Google be the sales rep in your store, or will you build experiences so essential, so convergent and so creative that even the smartest browser can’t replace them?
Dan Gardner is co-founder of Code and Theory.