Google launched a new “Automatic Exploration” feature to Chromium Wednesday. The tool, powered by Google’s current Gemini 3 Generative AI model, is an AI agent designed to take over your Chrome browser to help you complete online tasks like booking flights, finding apartments, and sorting expenses.
The release of Auto Browse is part of Google’s continued integration of AI features into Chrome. Last year, Google dropped the “Gemini in Chrome” mode to answer questions about web page content and summarize details from multiple open tabs.
Automatic navigation, which users can access by launching the Gemini the sidebar in Chrome, will only be available today in the United States for subscribers Google’s AI Pro and AI Ultra monthly plans. It’s unclear when auto-navigation will be available to non-paying users and other countries.
Google’s rollout fits Silicon Valley’s vision for the future of web browsing, which includes a lot more AI and a lot less of you. Whether it’s a browser designed from the ground up around generative AI, like OpenAI Atlasor one that has been equipped with new AI-based tools, like Google’s Chrome, almost every option available to consumers now has some level of built-in AI. (THE Vivaldi Browser is a notable exception for users who want to avoid AI-based web browsing.)
In a pre-launch demo, Charmaine D’Silva, director of product management for Chrome, showed me an example of Auto Browse helping her shop online. “Instead of having to remember where I bought something and trying to order something again,” she said, “I can now delegate the automatic navigation in Gemini so I can buy jackets for myself.” Typing a message into Chrome’s Gemini sidebar, D’Silva asked the bot to rearrange a jacket she bought last year and find a discount code before making the purchase.
Once launched, auto-navigation takes control of Chrome and performs ghostly clicks in its own tab while it attempts to accomplish the given task. “Use Gemini with caution and take control if necessary,” says a warning on the demo version. “You are responsible for Gemini’s actions during tasks.” Even if you send it into the digital wilderness, Google still considers you responsible for what its robot does online while responding to your requests.
For now, automation only goes so far. Tasks considered more sensitive by Google, such as posting to social networks and swiping your credit card still require a bit of supervision on the part of the user. In these situations, the Chrome bot will outline the steps needed to get this far and ask the user if they want to continue.
Anyone wishing to experiment with automatic navigation should seriously consider the security implications of this type of automation. Despite Google’s efforts to make it safer to use, auto-navigation and similar AI-based tools still risk being fooled by rapid injection attacks when visiting malicious websites, causing the bot to act in ways the original user did not intend.
I’ll be testing AutoNavigation this week to get a feel for its initial strengths and weaknesses and what the tool actually means for average Chrome users. In general, I am skeptical about Agentic AI tools designed to make your life more efficient and sweep away all your digital tasks. Bots are almost always overrated and I have found them to be consistently unreliable. Still, Google insists on realigning the web browsing experience around AI. Given Google’s track record of gradually rolling out new features, you should expect auto-navigation to roll out more widely in the near future.
