The Third Browser War Is Here: Why AI Agents, Not Chrome, Will Control the Next Entry

The Old War Was About Clicks

For two decades, we fought over who owned the homepage. Netscape lost to IE because it was bundled. Firefox won by being open-source and fast. Chrome crushed everyone with six-week releases and ad-backed infrastructure. But here’s the truth: no one ever asked if users actually wanted to click.

In 2024, 63% of Google searches ended without a single click. Users got weather, stock prices, flight times—right from the SERP. They didn’t need a webpage; they needed an answer.

The New War Is About Calls

AI agents don’t want to read pages—they want to use them.

I’ve analyzed Browser Use’s move: turning DOM into a semantic instruction tree readable by LLMs. That’s not UI refinement—it’s protocol redesign. If your product can’t be called like a function (e.g., ‘bookFlight(from=NYC,to=LAX)’), you’re already dead in Agent ecosystems.

Brave offers privacy—but no API hooks. Perplexity gives summaries—but no identity layer for crypto transactions.

Donut? They’re betting on AEO (Agent Engine Optimization). Forget SEO—now you optimize for task completion: ‘buy token’, ‘sign contract’, ‘transfer asset’. That’s not a feature—它是一个操作系统。

Why Browsers Still Matter

Agents need trusted execution environments. Chrome doesn’t own this—the browser does. It reads cookies, calls WebGPU wallets, authenticates via 2FA—all inside a sandbox where LLMs can’t reach. This is why nobody will replace it. They’ll embed into it.

The Real Battlefield Isn’t Search—It’s Scriptability

Your product isn’t valuable because it ranks high on Google. It’s valuable because an AI agent can invoke it without human intervention. Build your interface as an endpoint—not as content. If you’re coding a DApp or SaaS tool today—you’re not optimizing for SEO—you’re designing for AEO. Be the bridge between intent and execution—or get left behind.