Browserbase

Browserbase's homepage doesn't tell you who founded the company. It does tell you why it exists, and it's blunt about it. The team's bet is that "the browser is the web's native interface," and that AI agents stuck with official APIs are missing most of the internet. Their own number for that gap is 85%: the share of the web they say APIs can't reach. Login walls, vendor portals, government forms and sites with no API at all are the problem they built around. The pitch is "Use the whole web like it's an API," and the company claims 10,000+ companies are already building on it.

That starting point explains the product. Browserbase began with cloud browsers your agent can drive, and it's grown into a stack of primitives around that core. There's a Search API that returns relevant websites from a single query, a Fetch API that turns any URL into HTML, JSON or markdown, sandboxed Runtime environments for deploying agents, an Identity layer meant to give your agent "a verified identity that sites won't block," a Model Gateway that lets you use any model with a single API key, and Observability that ties replays, logs and prompts together for debugging. On the open source side, they maintain Stagehand, which they call "the most popular AI browser automation framework," plus a Browse CLI that adds browsing skills to an agent with one command and an MCP integration.

The use cases on the site are telling: KYB and records verification, portal filings, document retrieval from vendor portals, payroll and patient portal access your users authorize, and QA agents that click through your product and alert you when a flow breaks. That's not consumer AI. It's plumbing for teams whose agents need to log in, fill forms and pull data at scale, with "thousands of concurrent browser sessions" promised for research workloads. If you're building an agent that has to act on the web rather than just read it, Browserbase is one of the more complete options. If you just need a page scraped once, it's more than you need.