It’s the moment we were, perhaps, all waiting for: OpenAI , the creator of ChatGPT, has released Atlas—its own web browser.
No longer content with potentially being the new starting point of most online interactions, OpenAI (backed by Microsoft, among others) has its eyes set on running the whole show.
“We think that AI represents a once in a decade opportunity to rethink what a web browser can be about, how to use one and how to most productively and pleasantly use the web. Tabs were great but we haven’t seen a lot of browser innovation since then,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a launch video announcing Atlas.
“In the same that the URL bar and the search box were a great analogue, the way that we hope people will use the internet in the future and we’re starting to see is that the chat experience in a web browser can be a great analogue.”
“Atlas started with a question: what if you could chat with your browser? From that idea, we reimagined the entire experience,” added Altman’s colleague Ben Goodger, who leads engineering for Atlas.
What’s new with Atlas?
So what’s actually new? Quite a bit but, by the same token, not everything. Atlas still looks like a browser. It looks very similar to Chrome, as most browsers do, and it happens to be based on the same underlying Chromium code base as Google’s hegemonic browser.
But now, ChatGPT is the “beating heart” of the browser, according to Goodger, rather than a bolted-on button.
When you open the browser, you can still enter a URL to view a webpage or ask ChatGPT a question. To explore more specific types of results beyond the chat results, you can select from tabs for search links, images, videos and news.
ChatGPT also lives in your sidebar, allowing you to summarise, explain or handle tasks in the browser. ChatGPT can see the details of the page you’re on too, which should make responses more helpful and contextualised. Naturally, this means ChatGPT can see the pages you’re on before you do—more on that in a minute.
ChatGPT can also help users write in any open text field, offering in-line edits and suggestions.
Perhaps most significantly, ChatGPT can remember what you’ve explored and suggest what to do next—whether that’s returning to past pages, digging deeper into a topic, surfacing related ideas or automating routine tasks. Again, this could have hugely significant impacts for brands, retailers and more. Again, we’ll have more on that in a second.
You’ll have controls on browser memories, OpenAI said. While they can create to-do lists from your recent activity or continue researching holiday gifts based on products you’ve viewed, you can also turn off browser memories, turn them off or delete them after you’re finished with them. When visibility is turned off, ChatGPT won’t be able to view the page content, either.
Scraping, Controls & More
“By default, we don’t use the content you browse to train our models,” said OpenAI.
“If you choose to opt-in this content, you can enable ‘include web browsing’ in your data controls settings. If you’ve enabled training for chats in your ChatGPT account, training will also be enabled for chats in Atlas. This includes website content you’ve attached when using the Ask ChatGPT sidebar and browser memories that inform your chats.
“Parental controls work in Atlas, too. If a parent has set up parental controls for ChatGPT, these settings will carry over to conversations with ChatGPT in Atlas. We’re also introducing new parental controls in Atlas, including the option for parents to turn off browser memories and agent mode,” it continued.
It added that Atlas’ agents cannot run code in the browser, download files, or install extensions. Nor can it access other apps on your computer or file system and will even “pause” to ensure people watch it take actions on specific sensitive sites such as financial institutions.
That said, it noted that “besides simply making mistakes” the agents are “susceptible to hidden malicious instructions, which may be hidden in places such as a webpage or email”.
B&T cannot foresee any problems there…
What Does Atlas Mean For Adland?
“Projecting a future is really tricky,” Dan Benton, Mindshare’s managing director of digital solutions told B&T.
“It’s potentially different. We track visits to ChatGPT using Similarweb, it’s now at 120 million monthly visits—with the caveats that Similarweb is a model, but it’s getting a sense of a trend which is growing 100 per cent year-on-year. We’ve not seen that with Brave, Duck Duck Go or any of the search alternatives. I feel this is different because ChatGPT has a really solid product market fit… it has cut-through, adoption and a really good product.”
OpenAI is not the first company behind an AI chatbot to launch a browser. Perplexity launched its Comet browser earlier this year, though to significantly less fanfare. In fact, Perplexity even attempted an audacious acquisition of Google’s Chrome browser earlier this year. In TikTok ads B&T has seen for Comet, the presenters even say its features are akin to having ChatGPT in your browser—talk about a brand awareness problem.
A variety of different industry insider B&T has spoken to over the past few weeks and months do not believe that there will be the same winner-takes-all scenario with AI search as there has been with traditional search and the browser market. But, in order to continue scaling, OpenAI does need to reach a critical mass of users to continue growing.
“The browser is a way to build greater stickiness with consumers,” added Benton.
That stickiness could come from removing friction in tedious purchases, as much as eliminating the need for people to think—as has been hypothesised by many gen AI observers.
“Think about the direction of travel here. We’ve got AI models with memory, we’ve got agentic browsers, Google has launched its agentic payment protocol. None of this has got mass cut-through. But you can see a point where the agents will complete transactions on your behalf,” said Benton.
“Our take is that those transactions will be fairly low friction or low importance—re-order things, book movie tickets—I think it’s highly unlikely it’ll refinance a home loan or buy a car for you. ”
Benton said Atlas and ChatGPT’s memory functions—to remember choices, previous interactions and more—combined with agentic shopping was potentially “really powerful”.
That said, the launch of Atlas doesn’t change the need for clients to understand where they fit in AI models, according to Benton. Essentially, Atlas has turned up the AI volume, rather than changing the track—it will not, in fact, turn adland entirely upside down.
Unless, perhaps you are a news publisher or involved in any section of the digital display ad supply chain thanks to web page summaries. Atlas launched with an example of ChatGPT summarising a Wall Street Journal article. Why scroll when you can summarise?
Clearly, that could be catastrophic for display advertising viewability and, ergo, publisher monetisation. No media execs were willing or available to make an on-the-record comment about this matter to B&T at the time of publication.
Perhaps that tells its own story.
