The browser sees everything. This is the reason we’re getting so many new AI-first browsers from The Browser Co, Perplexity, and soon OpenAI. So they can “see” data that they increasingly cannot scrape. AI feeds on data. It gets the data by automatically scraping the web. But scraping is no longer free. CDNs like Cloudflare are making scraping harder by blocking it by default, and others will soon follow. Startups like TollBit are empowering tons of large publishers to charge for being scraped, building a new open web economy. But consumers want AI. We can’t get enough of it. And as AI answers increasingly eat traditional web search, AI will be doing much more browsing on behalf of us humans (scraping). This creates a paradox: consumer behavior is shifting to AI, but AI is running out of fuel to meet the demand. So what happens? AI companies build browsers. As humans consume content with these browsers, the AI company can “see” data that is increasingly being blocked or monetized. The most interesting this about this strategy is that AI companies don’t even need meaningful market share or customer ubiquity for this strategy to work. They just need a large enough slice of all browsing to get a taste of most of the web’s data. It’s a whole new business model for the web and the beginning of a new browser war. h/t @scottbelsky @stevejang