Is AI Replacing The Way You Browse The Internet?

Back in the good old days, one had to look through a plethora of links on the internet to find the right piece of information they were looking for, the older generation that found internet surfing - a term that came about as the online world took charge of the work- too complicated and so, stuck to offline libraries, newspaper cuttings, until it almost felt impossible to keep oneself away from it. Full circle? Maybe.

Today, the dominance of search engines like Google and Bing in shaping how we browse and gather information might be under serious threat? Or, is it simply a case of too much curiosity around a shiny new tool that makes life easier than we ever imagined?

Pinterest

Ask a question, and instead of being buried under endless links, you’re given an instant answer and a few links, if you really want to dig deeper. Dating advice, once overwhelmingly impersonal, is now instantly personalised and feels a little more tailored to you than the usual blogs or gossip columns in magazines. Or, the awkward conversations you’d rather avoid with a friend. AI generative tools like ChatGPT, Claude AI, and Gemini AI are now at your service, sparing you the exhausting surf session altogether.

Moreover, every moment interacting with AI feels like a breakthrough, there’s the unmistakable sense that something’s being lost. The casual rabbit hole that starts with "best boots for winter" and ends with you reading about Japanese denim at 2 a.m.— seems to be slipping out of our hands. AI is all about destination; search, and you get what you wanted- usually after a long conversation that constitutes at least 3 prompts.

More than having to surf through the internet to get what you want on a search engine, a chatbot can confidently tell you Ernest Hemingway wrote The Great Gatsby (he didn't), or that pineapple juice cures anxiety (it doesn’t). The accuracy of human-backed information versus AI is the trouble really.

It's just a prediction machine dressed up like a know-it-all. It hallucinates facts, invents sources, and often says exactly what you want to hear. Like that flaky friend who tells you you’re right even when you’re dead wrong. C'mon!

Also, a good and a bad thing maybe is that while the browser has always been a window into the world—full of ads, yes, but also full of surprise, dissent, and weirdness. AI compresses that experience into a sterile exchange: one question, one answer. It's clean. It's convenient. It's… kind of boring.

But forget chatbots. AI browsers could be taking over soon. But is there anything at stake, really?

The browser, once the gateway to the web, is being eaten by the very thing it’s supposed to display. Arc, Opera’s Neon, Perplexity’s $200/month Comet browser — they’re all chasing a future where you don’t browse. You ask. The AI does the legwork. It visits the pages. It fills out the forms. It compares prices. Then it spits out the result. Browsing, in the traditional sense, might be on life support.

Pinterest

Instead of surfing, you’ll be chauffeured and that’s not all bad. For those that utterly despise reading , these browsers can Summarise 6,000-word articles, even help you skip three-hour YouTube explainers? Even better. But what if the AI starts skipping the truth, too?

We already know these tools “hallucinate” facts. They tell you Ernest Hemingway wrote The Great Gatsby (he didn’t). And, next, the ads are coming. Perplexity’s CEO recently said the quiet part out loud. Their new AI browser is built to track your online behaviour and personalise ads accordingly. The whole point? “To get data even outside the app to better understand you.” It’s not even a bug. It’s the business model.

We’ve been here before. Social media platforms promised connection, then delivered division. Google promised answers, then delivered ads. And now AI promises ease but could deliver a sterilised, ad-laced, curiosity-free web. It’s like asking your GPS to reroute through a well-known supermarket because they've paid for it and so the recommended route.

Maybe this is just evolution. Stick shifts became automatics. Encyclopedias gave way to Wikipedia. But when the very act of looking becomes obsolete — and the AI starts doing the looking for you — we lose more than control, don't you think?

We lose curiosity. We lose randomness. We lose the ability to question the answers.

The browser used to be a window to the world. Now it’s a vending machine. While it is really fast, efficient, you cannot disagree that it is kind of boring. And perhaps, the worst part? We asked for it.