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Chrome will now browse the web for you. Auto Browse, powered by Gemini 3, is an agentic feature that navigates websites, fills out forms, compares options, and completes multi-step tasks on your behalf. If you subscribe to Google (GOOGL) AI Pro or Ultra, you can ask Chrome to research hotels, compare flight prices, schedule appointments, collect tax documents, or manage subscriptions while you do something else.

This is Google’s response to OpenAI’s Atlas browser, which launched in October with similar capabilities. The difference is distribution. Chrome commands over 65 percent of the global browser market. OpenAI has to convince people to switch browsers. Google just had to flip a switch.

The feature that deserves your attention is the Universal Commerce Protocol. Google co-developed UCP with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, and Target to create a standardized way for AI agents to interact with e-commerce sites. This is plumbing, and plumbing determines what gets built on top.

When eBay banned AI shopping agents last week, it was fighting a rearguard action. Google just announced the infrastructure that makes agentic commerce inevitable. Retailers can resist or they can participate in the protocol that will define how AI agents shop. That calculus favors participation.

Google acknowledges that Auto Browse is vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks on malicious websites and states that users are responsible for the consequences. This is nontrivial. The productivity gains are real, but so is the expanded attack surface.

I’m excited to see where this goes. The business model may look different, the line item may have a new name, but at the end of the day, whether you call it “paid search” or “agentic commerce,” you’re still going to be writing a big check to Google.

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