A substantial offer. Condemned by the abuse of a dominant position in the search engines market, Google could soon be forced to sell your Chrome browser.
Perplexity, an American company that specializes in artificial intelligence, does not intend to lose this opportunity. In the Wall Street Journal, we find out that he wants to buy the bagatela search engine of $ 34.5 billion. This almost corresponds to the double the value of the company, valued at $ 18 billion.
“In the greatest public interest”
Although Google has never announced that the browser is sold, Chrome is already subject to the lust of many other technological giants. It should be said that it dominates the sectors of the search engines with almost 68% of the market share in July 2025 according to Statcounter (Safari reaches second place with 16%). Last April, Operai already expressed his desire to want to buy the browser.
But in this field, perplexity does not intend to leave the free field to its rival. The Wall Street Journal was able to consult a letter written by the company and sent directly to L succinity Pichai, The Alphabet Boss (Mother House of Google). In it, perplexity explains that its offer is “designed to satisfy an anticompetitive measure in the greatest public interest, by trusting Chrome to a competent and independent operator.”
The perplexity also specifies that Google would continue to be the predetermined search engine and that the Chromium project, an open -source Internet browser (the code is accessible to the public), it would remain if Chrome was sold to him.
An AI that struggles to take off
For perplexity, obtaining Chrome could remove the use of its services. Where the company wants precisely to stand out from its competitors, it is offering an AI that is as close as possible to a search engine, not a chatbot.
But currently perplexity is struggling to seduce users. The company’s AI occupies the sixth place in terms of uses, with 18.5 million unique visitors in May 2025 according to social figures. By way of comparison, it is 22 times less than Chatgpt (411 million visitors), the OpenAi AI.
The company has also been in recent controversies in recent times. The first refers to the illegal appropriation of the content in the sites. More specifically, certain sites, including paid information, prohibit the AI getting to recover content to provide its database. However, the AI of perplexity used to use Chrome characteristics, to pretend to be a human user to steal data from the sites.
Last week, Perpleity announced an association with the Pro-Trump social network, Truth Social. The objective is to integrate an AI agent capable of carrying out research directly from the platform. But the AI recently proved to be critical with respect to the owner of the social network, which does not guarantee its maintenance.
Source: BFM TV
