The Next 'Big Thing': AI Browsers & What Marketing Leaders Need to Know Now

Over the last year AI search has rapidly evolved. AIOs, GEO, and even agentic workflows are now a part of almost every marketing conversation. And while we’re still learning a ton there, maybe it kinda, sorta feels like we’re starting to get our feet under ourselves in marketing land.

We should have known better.

AI Browsers have entered the chat.

It’s still too soon to tell if this is a buzzy distraction or the next big thing. But it is very interesting. And packs the potential to be the next big disruption in marketing.

What makes AI Browsers uniquely disruptive is the further consolidation of the searcher’s experience. Traditional (old?) search was 10 blue links. Today it’s featured snippets, AIOs, and search results packed with a lot more options and context, with more and more users shifting to using LLMs for certain queries. AI Browsers compact that whole experience down to (potentially) only one answer. And then take action on your behalf. So if this becomes a winner-takes-all scenario, how do you as a marketing leader begin to adapt your strategy to this next-new-thing?

What is an AI Browser?

Before you can start to ask smart questions, you need to understand what it really is first.

An AI browser is a new type of web browser that answers your questions directly, rather than showing search results. It replaces the traditional URL bar with a chat interface and delivers highly personal and context rich conversational responses using live context from your browsing session and information from your accounts, like your inbox and calendar. The goal is to further reduce friction, giving you exactly what you need without clicking through multiple websites, with AI browsers taking that one step further and even taking action on your behalf based on the conversation. .
One question. One answer. Zero friction. That's at least the promise of Perplexity's beta release and Microsoft's Copilot-powered Edge previews. You land on a branded welcome screen that greets you by name ("Ready when you are, Jordan"), but the default interface isn't a URL bar, it's a chat box.

How is the AI Browsing Experience Different?

Think research assistant, not search engine. The psychological shift happens immediately when you realize you're having a conversation instead of hunting through blue links.

Context-Rich

Ask: "what tabs do I have open and what can you help me with?" The browser scans your current session, groups pages into themes like "Technical Projects & Debugging," then suggests specific next steps. It's actively reading your workspace, not just displaying it.

Zero-click Discovery Dominates

Type: "women's strength studio south philly" and the browser serves a complete facility breakdown: class types, pricing hints, competitor comparisons. All without visiting a single website. Your carefully optimized landing page? It becomes a citation, not a destination.

If visitors do click into the website, they might ask "do they have private training here?" and get answers pulled from headers and schedule sections instantly.

SERP intelligence

While browsing Google for "best coffee beans," an embedded AI panel can grab the "People Also Ask" questions and draft SEO content in real time. Research to outline happens in one viewport.

How Your Traffic Patterns Will Change

Attention compression happens fast
The journey from intent to outcome collapses into a chat exchange. Brands that built visibility around SERP positioning or persuasive landing pages now compete for recommendations upstream - inside training data or via real-time citations
Measurement blind spots multiply
Traditional analytics depend on page loads. When answers surface inside browsers like chrome, your pixels never fire because customers are never getting to your websites. This is the new zero-click reality we’re living in with the rise of AI Overviews and AI Answers. Forbes described this as the 60% Problem, where they cite research from Bain & Company that estimates… “about 60% of searches now end without the user progressing to another destination”. This clearly signals new behaviors in search
Hyper-personal context arrives soon
Upcoming integrations with email, calendar, and file storage mean answers will reflect private user data. A recommendation engine that knows your flight confirmations and meeting schedules will filter results accordingly

The Central Question Every Marketing Leader Should Be Asking

"How likely is this shift to impact my audience, and what's my plan to maintain (or, rather, grow) my share of attention when it does?"

Audience Impact: How well do you know your audience?

The core question isn't whether AI browsers will change search behavior, but whether YOUR specific audience will adopt them. If they do, what does that mean for your visibility?

Tech-forward, information-seeking users who already embrace AI tools are potential early adopters, while habitual browsers who rely on bookmarks and routine will lag behind. Understanding your current traffic patterns (search-driven vs. direct) reveals your vulnerability, but the real challenge lies in measurement However, brands with strong existing touchpoints (newsletters like Superhuman, regular user interactions) may actually benefit from AI browsers' deep personalization, as these relationships could amplify their visibility when users research related topics because they are starting to account for your personal browsing context.

Is my Moat Going to Fail?

Most digital marketers have spent quality time building their content moats. Creating valuable content that sets them apart. If this becomes a winner-takes-most approach, that quality may do you a favor.

But things will look a little different. If your moat was surface level content that was stellar at getting traffic to your website… but not deep or differentiated enough to build community and brand, you may need to rethink your strategy. If your moat offers some real value, you could earn even more valuable visibility. The nuance lies in the word “valuable”.

Your KPI might have been traffic or on-site engagement before. If you’re THE defacto answer in the AI browser, your brand is cited... that’s serious value! But your old KPI won’t capture that.

Understanding LLM value through your growing GEO strategy will likely support your ability to gauge potential success in an AI browser future.

So How DO We Measure This Thing?

When it comes to AI Browser Traffic, we're flying partially blind. Current measurement capabilities capture only a fraction of AI-driven traffic, which is primarily from ChatGPT citations and a few other tools that properly identify themselves. The majority of AI browser traffic is likely showing up as direct traffic and inflating your numbers, remaining unmeasurable with standard analytics setups. However, there is hope!

The AI Browser Landscape: Here’s What We're Dealing With

AI browsers and AI-enhanced search tools operate differently from traditional search engines. Instead of simply indexing and ranking pages, they:

Crawl websites to gather information
Synthesize content from multiple sources
Present summarized answers with citations
Generate responses that may or may not include clickable links to source websites

This fundamental difference means traditional analytics approaches need adaptation to capture the full picture of AI-driven traffic and brand mentions.

The Challenge of “Invisible Mentions”

Unlike traditional search engines where you can monitor SERPs and track keyword rankings, AI tools often mention brands within synthesized responses without necessarily driving direct traffic. This creates what we call "dark traffic" problem for brand monitoring. The key to tracking AI browser traffic lies in understanding how these tools identify themselves through user agents and referrer data.

When AI browser traffic hits your website without proper channel grouping, it typically gets categorized as:

Direct Traffic: Many AI tools don't pass referrer information, causing visits to appear as direct traffic. This inflates your direct channel and obscures the true source of these visits
Organic Search: Some AI tools may pass referrer data that gets incorrectly categorized as organic search, particularly if they use search engine domains in their referrer strings
Referral Traffic: More sophisticated AI tools that properly identify themselves may appear in your referral reports, but without custom grouping, they'll be scattered across multiple referrer domains

Digital analytics expert Eric Matisoff's research recently revealed the challenge we're facing: massive inconsistency in how AI tools pass attribution data.

The Solution: Custom Channel Groupings with RegEx

While we can't capture all AI-driven traffic (from AI Browsers or LLM’s), creating custom channel groupings in GA4 allows us to identify and track the AI tool visits that do pass proper attribution data. This involves using RegEx patterns to recognize AI tool domains and UTM parameters. And the time to do this is NOW! As AI Traffic grows, you’ll be on the watch for how much and how quickly.

Setting Up Your AI Traffic Channel in GA4

Several experts, including Dana DiTomasi and the team at KP Playbook have developed a comprehensive RegEx pattern that captures the major AI tools currently sending trackable traffic.

Managing Expectations: What This Solves (and Doesn't)

What custom channel groupings accomplish:

Clear identification of web-based AI tool traffic with proper referrers
Separation of identifiable AI traffic from generic referral traffic
Foundation for tracking AI traffic trends over time
Baseline measurement for optimization efforts

What remains invisible:

The majority of mobile app-driven AI traffic
AI mentions that don't result in clicks
Inconsistently attributed traffic that still appears as direct

Maintaining Your AI Tracking Setup

AI tools evolve rapidly, so your channel grouping requires regular maintenance:

Monitor new AI tools entering the market and update your RegEx accordingly
Check for user agent changes that might affect attribution
Review direct traffic spikes that could indicate new sources of dark AI traffic
Test the RegEx pattern quarterly to ensure it's capturing current AI tool domains

Custom channel groupings won't solve the dark traffic problem entirely, but they provide the foundation for understanding your identifiable AI-driven traffic while the industry works toward better attribution standards.

Embracing the AI Analytics Challenge

AI browsers represent both a challenge and an opportunity for digital analysts, complicating traditional attribution models while offering new ways to understand customer behavior and brand perception. The key to success lies in proactive adaptation: setting up proper tracking infrastructure, regularly monitoring for new AI tools, and viewing AI traffic as a valuable component of the overall customer journey rather than an analytics inconvenience. By implementing custom channel groupings, monitoring brand mentions, and staying current with AI tool evolution, digital analysts can turn the AI browser challenge into a competitive advantage.

AI browsers aren't just changing how people find information, they're changing how people discover and interact with brands, and the brands that understand AI traffic attribution today will be best positioned to leverage these powerful new channels as they continue to grow.

What You Do Today

Is this another major shift in how digital marketers are going to function in the future of search? Or is this just more noise? The world looks very different when the user stops utilizing the internet as a “digital gateway” where they chose their own adventure. And instead it’s a curated, concierge experience.

This Isn’t a Thing… Yet

First of all, it’s important to remember that while this packs star potential, it’s not yet being really used. Our founder and CEO, who’s at the forefront of trying, testing and leaning into the new-and-noteworthy of AI for marketers is even skeptical:

“I'm not sold. Sometimes something comes along that's better, but it's not so much better than the current state of how somebody is solving a problem. I feel like AI browsers will be okay for the next few years, but then I can see things being more of a direct interface where you're just talking to a thing or you're typing in maybe, but even the keyboard at some point is likely to go away because it's just another friction point. I never misspell a thought, but I always misspell when I'm typing. It's just friction. A browser is putting a visual onto many things that don't need visuals. Yes, can it string together a series of tasks that you'd rather not do? Absolutely. But from a B2B standpoint, you can pretty much do that in Zapier most times, and not have to sit there and correct it and log it in and all that. So that's just my hot take, two cents.”

The idea here being that this isn’t enough of a shift away from search as we know it today to be truly disruptive and isn’t really solving a big enough problem to warrant a massive behavioral shift in audience behavior.

So does Wil think you should ignore AI Browsers? No. Like any new release, he recommends figure out what you should measure, what you even can measure, and then monitoring it for impact.

Your Next Step: Start Following Your Audience For Signals

Start by understanding your audience breakdown. If you serve an older demographic or a less tech savvy audience, this is likely noise (for now), not signal. Make sure you’re tracking it and don’t get bogged down by the volume; early signals reveal themselves in (1) % of overall traffic and (2) the growth of that number period over period.

Less Friction, Hyper Personalization, Fast Adoption…. Right?

As a user, less friction is better. That’s exciting. But as someone who has been using the internet for ~30 years, I’m set in my ways to some degree. Searching is second nature to me and I am not sure I like the idea of going from a query to a chosen answer. This shift requires users to put a lot of faith into tech having their best interests, the best possible answers.

We’ve talked a bit about this in terms of AI shopping. Does this truly remove friction? Or does it solve a problem I didn’t have in the first place: I like seeing my options before making a purchase. Do I really want AI to go shop and make a selection for me? I’m not sure.