Google Chrome Now Ships with Built-in AI
Chrome's Gemini Nano brings on-device AI to the browser. Here's what that means for web applications and user privacy.
Google is shipping Chrome with an AI model built directly into the browser. Called Gemini Nano, it’s a ~1.5GB language model that runs entirely on your device, no server calls, no data leaving your machine, and with no cost.
Why This Matters for SEOs
There’s a real risk of this seeming like an overly technical thing that doesn't matter to search marketers. But I think this is maybe one of the biggest inflection points to happen to search and possibly the internet in decades.
AI is transitioning from a costly infrequent tool that you had to manually request to do something to something that is just constantly running in the background and doing things for you.
We’re on the verge of:
- Real-time content quality assessment - The browser can evaluate whether content actually answers a user’s query before they even scroll
- Automated Recommendation - Chrome could surface key points from articles, making thin content immediately obvious
- Cross-page+tab comparison - “This page says X, but three other tabs say Y” becomes trivial to compute
- Engagement prediction - The model can estimate whether users will find content useful or interesting based on patterns it’s learned and their browsing history
And ALL of this is going to be built upon how Gemini Nano "feels" about your content and your brand.
To help with this we’ve built a tool specifically to surface what Gemini Nano in Chrome thinks about your site, what your business does, who your competitors are and more.
You can try it out right now:
Real-World Availability
I tested this on SendCheckIt, a free email subject line testing tool that I built.
Where we added a new feature that automatically generated better subject lines for emails based on the subject line you entered. This was done by calling the Gemini Nano model directly from the browser.
I talk some more about the technical details of how detection of Gemini Nano availability works in Gemini Nano in Production: 53% Availability, 3x Slower, $0 Cost on the SendCheckIt blog, but the big takeaway is that over half of our users right now are eligible to use Gemini Nano in Chrome today.
The Gemini Nano model in Chrome is available right now for 53.7% of our users.
The Trade-offs
On-device inference is significantly slower than cloud APIs. Our median response time was 11 seconds locally versus 1.4 seconds via API. For some use cases that’s acceptable; for others it’s not.
Good fit: Privacy-sensitive features, cost-sensitive high-volume use, offline requirements
Not a fit: Real-time features, autocomplete, consistent response times
The Bigger Picture
Search is bending inevitably towards AI and this latest move by Google is just part of it.
We’ve already seen AI Overviews replace traditional search results, ChatGPT become a go-to research tool, and Perplexity emerge as a credible Google alternative. Now Google is embedding AI directly into the browser itself.
This isn’t a single shift to adapt to. It’s a continuous transformation which is why we built Knowatoa, to be the best AI brand monitoring service across all of the diffrent AI services.