Arc Search

Arc Search is the mobile browser from The Browser Company that brought Browse for Me to millions of iPhone users: type a question, and instead of a list of links you get a synthesized page built from multiple sources. It was the most visible piece of the company's original thesis that AI should be woven into the browser itself. By 2026 that thesis has evolved into a new product called Dia, a workflow-oriented browser aimed at knowledge workers. Arc and Arc Search still exist, they're still free, and Browse for Me still works well. But the center of gravity at The Browser Company has clearly shifted. This review covers what Arc Search does well, what it no longer promises, and whether it's still a sensible daily driver.

When Arc Search launched in January 2024 it felt like a genuine rethink of what a browser could be. You opened it on your iPhone, typed a question, and instead of a page of blue links you got a synthesized answer built from multiple sources, with citations, formatted like something a human researcher might hand you. The feature was called Browse for Me, and it spread fast. Arc Search hit a million users in its first few weeks. The Browser Company, the New York startup that built it, seemed to be winning the argument that AI belonged inside the browser rather than bolted on as an extension.

That argument has gotten more complicated since then. By 2025 the company announced its pivot to Dia, a new browser built around workplace context rather than general browsing. Arc Browser and Arc Search are still alive, still free, and still doing what they were built to do. But the people who made them are focused somewhere else now. That changes how you should think about the product.

Quick verdict

Arc Search is one of the cleanest mobile browsers available and Browse for Me still outperforms a standard search page for quick factual questions. It’s free, private by default, and genuinely pleasant to use. The catch is that The Browser Company’s roadmap now points toward Dia, not Arc. What you’re installing is an excellent, stable product with no meaningful roadmap. For most people, that’s fine.

What is Arc Search, exactly?

The Browser Company was founded in 2019 by Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal with the premise that Chrome had become bloated infrastructure and that someone should build a browser as if browsers had been invented today. The desktop Arc browser launched in 2023 after a long invite-only beta and built a devoted following on macOS. Its Spaces feature, which let you create separate browser environments for different projects or identities, felt like the first genuinely new tab management idea in years.

Arc Search was the mobile branch of that vision. Released to the public in January 2024, it was designed for iOS first and brought Browse for Me as its central feature. The idea was simple and effective: when you have a question, you want an answer, not a list of potential answers. Arc Search would do the reading for you.

The broader Arc ecosystem on desktop got a Windows version in 2024 and continued adding AI features under the Arc Max banner, including automatic tab titling, five-second page previews, and pinch-to-summarize on mobile. For about a year it felt like the company was shipping fast on a coherent vision.

Then in 2025 the company disclosed publicly that it was shifting focus to Dia. Dia is a browser built for people who live in GSuite, Slack, GitHub, and Notion during the workday. It surfaces a Morning Brief, watches what you’re working on, and offers proactive suggestions based on your calendar and recent documents. It’s a real product with a real thesis, but it’s a different thesis from Arc’s.

The announcement was honest. The Browser Company said Arc wasn’t being killed but that major new feature development was effectively stopping. Arc would be maintained and kept free. For a company that had signed up a large community of power users on a promise of reimagining browsing, that was a notable shift.

The features that defined the bet

Browse for Me as a synthesis tool

Browse for Me is still the reason most people download Arc Search. You type a question in the search bar and instead of landing on a search results page, the browser spins for a few seconds and returns a formatted page it built itself. The page reads like a well-structured briefing: a direct answer at the top, supporting context below, and inline citations you can tap to reach the original source.

The quality depends heavily on question type. For factual questions with clear answers, it’s consistently better than scanning a search results page. For contested topics, recent events, or anything where sources disagree, it sometimes glosses over the tension. It doesn’t try to tell you when sources conflict; it synthesizes toward a single answer. That’s a meaningful limitation if you’re using it for anything consequential.

It’s also worth knowing what Browse for Me isn’t. It’s not an agentic research tool. It doesn’t follow citations recursively, doesn’t build reports, and doesn’t retain context between questions. It’s a fast synthesis of what the open web says right now. For most mobile search use cases, that’s exactly what you need.

Mobile-first design

The app’s interface is worth talking about separately from Browse for Me because it’s genuinely good on its own terms. Arc Search is opinionated in a way most mobile browsers refuse to be. The address bar is at the bottom. Tabs are gestural rather than a tray of thumbnails. The reading experience is clean by default, with an automatic reader mode that strips ads and navigation chrome from articles without requiring you to tap anything.

For people who read a lot on their phones, the difference from Safari or Chrome is noticeable within a few minutes of use. The browser doesn’t feel like a desktop app that was made smaller. It was designed for a thumb.

Pinch-to-summarize and other AI features

Pinch-to-summarize lets you pull two fingers toward each other on any web page and get a condensed version of what you’re reading. It works well on long articles, news stories, and documentation. The summaries are short enough to be useful and accurate enough that you can decide whether to read the full piece.

The desktop version of Arc also shipped features under the Arc Max label, including instant link previews that show you a five-second snapshot of a page before you commit to opening it. These were genuinely useful and the kind of small friction reduction that adds up over a day of browsing.

Spaces and tab management

Arc’s Spaces feature, available on both desktop and mobile, lets you create separate browser environments for different contexts. Your work tabs, personal tabs, and side-project tabs live in distinct spaces that don’t bleed into each other. This sounds simple but in practice it reduces the low-grade anxiety that comes from a browser with fifty open tabs.

Desktop Arc takes this further with an expiring tabs feature that automatically closes tabs you haven’t visited recently. You stop hoarding tabs you’ll never reopen. For people who have tried and failed to keep their browser organized with folders or tab managers, Arc’s approach is the first one that actually sticks.

Where Arc fits in the company portfolio now

Dia runs on macOS with Apple Silicon and targets professional users with deep integrations into the tools knowledge workers use daily. Arc remains the product for everyone else. The Browser Company has been clear that it intends to keep Arc free and operational, but it has also been clear that the team’s creative energy is going into Dia.

In practical terms, Arc Search is excellent frozen software. The Browse for Me feature works. The design is good. The privacy defaults are strong. None of that will degrade tomorrow. But if you’re evaluating a daily-driver browser and want to know that the people who built it are still improving it, the honest answer is that they’re improving something else.

Pricing

Arc Search and Arc Browser are free. Both have been free since launch, there is no Arc Pro or Arc subscription, and The Browser Company has not announced plans to change that. Browse for Me has no usage cap. You don’t create an account to use the core features. The company has monetized through investor funding rather than user revenue, which is either reassuring or concerning depending on how you think about software sustainability.

Arc Max, which bundles the AI-powered features on desktop, is also free. There’s no separate tier for five-second previews or tab titles. All of it comes with the browser.

Dia, the company’s new product, has a separate download and its own positioning. It has been available as a free early-access product for macOS with Apple Silicon chips. Whether Dia eventually moves to a paid model isn’t confirmed as of May 2026, but given that it’s targeting workplace users who have IT budgets, a subscription tier seems more likely there than for Arc.

For Arc Search specifically, free means free. No strings, no ads, no data sold. The privacy policy explicitly states the company doesn’t track your browsing history or search queries. For a product in this category that’s a meaningful commitment.

Where Arc wins and where it doesn’t

Arc Search wins on execution. Browse for Me is a real feature that does what it says, the mobile design is the best in its class, and pinch-to-summarize is the kind of small detail that makes a product feel thought through. The privacy defaults are genuine, not marketing copy. And the price is zero.

Where it doesn’t win is continuity. The Browser Company has been transparent that Arc is not where the team is focused. That matters in software because products that aren’t actively developed start to accumulate technical debt, miss platform updates, and slowly fall behind competitors who are shipping. Arc Search on iOS will stay current because Apple forces browsers to stay current. The deeper features are less certain.

Browse for Me also has a quality ceiling. It’s better than a search results page for quick questions and noticeably worse than a dedicated research tool like Perplexity for anything requiring depth, source selection, or follow-up. It doesn’t show you which model is generating the synthesis, which makes it hard to calibrate trust.

The Android version is a real gap. It exists and works, but it doesn’t have feature parity with iOS, and given where the team’s priorities are, that gap is unlikely to close.

Who Arc is built for

Arc Search is the right tool for people who want a mobile browser that gets out of the way. If you’re someone who opens Safari, types a question, scans three articles, and then closes everything, Browse for Me shortens that workflow to one step. You get the answer without the searching.

It also suits people who’ve tried to organize their browser and failed. Spaces is the most practical tab management system in any browser, and it works without requiring discipline or a system. You create a space for a project, open tabs into it, and they stay there until you’re done.

It’s less suited to power researchers, people who rely on browser extensions for their work, or anyone building workflows on top of their browser. Arc has no extension ecosystem comparable to Chrome’s, and Browse for Me isn’t designed for iterative research where you build on previous queries.

People who want a browser whose developers are actively shipping new ideas should look at Dia, which is what The Browser Company is actually building right now. Arc Search is best thought of as a mature, stable product that does specific things well.

Arc vs the alternatives

Arc Search vs Perplexity: The overlap is real but the use cases are different. Perplexity is a dedicated AI search engine with deeper source control, model selection on Pro, and a conversational interface built for follow-up questions. Arc Search’s Browse for Me is faster to reach on mobile and good enough for most casual questions, but Perplexity wins for anything that needs rigor. If you do research as part of your job, you want Perplexity. If you want AI search to feel built into your browser rather than living in a separate app, Arc Search is the cleaner experience.

Arc Search vs You.com: You.com positions itself as an AI-first search engine with a broader set of modes including writing and coding assistants. It lives in a browser tab rather than being the browser itself. Arc Search has the design and user experience advantage on mobile. You.com has more flexibility in how you query and more explicitness about which models are doing what. They’re complementary more than competitive.

Arc Search vs Genspark: Genspark’s Sparkpages are the closest direct competitor to Browse for Me. Both synthesize web content into a formatted page. Genspark’s version tends to go deeper, pulls from more sources, and is better for structured research tasks. Arc Search is faster to launch and lives inside your browser. For the /best/ai-agent-for-research/ use case at a professional level, Genspark has the edge. For everyday browsing questions on your phone, Arc Search requires less effort to reach.

The honest competitive picture is that Arc Search is best understood as a browser with good AI built in, while its alternatives are AI tools with varying degrees of browsing capability. If you want the AI front and center, use one of those. If you want a browser that happens to be smarter than Chrome, Arc Search is still the answer.

Getting started

Download Arc Search from the App Store on iOS or Google Play on Android. Open it, set it as your default browser in Settings if you want, and start typing questions into the address bar. The first time you type a question and hit search, Browse for Me activates automatically if your query looks like a question rather than a navigation shortcut. You can also long-press the search icon to force Browse for Me on any query.

On desktop, Arc is available at arc.net for macOS and Windows. The onboarding walks you through creating your first Space and importing bookmarks. Give the Spaces system a week before judging it. The workflow of separating your contexts takes a few days to become intuitive but once it clicks it’s hard to go back to a standard browser.

For the best results from Browse for Me, ask specific questions. “What’s the difference between RAG and fine-tuning?” will return a better page than “AI explained.” The more focused your question, the more useful the synthesis.

The bottom line

Arc Search remains one of the best mobile browsers available and Browse for Me is a feature worth having, especially for free. The product is well-designed, genuinely private, and still works exactly as intended.

The shadow over it is the pivot to Dia. The Browser Company built something good and then pointed their attention somewhere else. That’s an honest choice and they’ve been transparent about it. It means Arc Search is a stable product with a ceiling, not a developing one with momentum.

If you want a cleaner mobile browser today, download it. If you want to understand where The Browser Company thinks AI-native browsing goes next, look at Dia. And if you need more than Browse for Me can offer for serious research work, pair Arc Search with Perplexity or Genspark rather than expecting one app to do everything.

Key features

• Browse for Me: synthesizes a custom page from a question instead of returning a list of links
• Pinch-to-summarize any web page in a single gesture
• Spaces and profiles for separating work, personal, and project contexts
• Arc Max AI features including five-second page previews and tidy tab titles
• Full-screen reader mode that strips clutter from articles automatically
• Split View for side-by-side browsing on larger screens
• Private by default with no tracking of visited sites or search queries

Pros and cons

Who is Arc Search for?

• Quick research on mobile where you want an answer, not ten blue links
• Distraction-free reading with automatic clutter removal and pinch-to-summarize
• Organizing browser context by project or role using Spaces
• Privacy-conscious users who want a capable browser without being the product

Alternatives to Arc Search

If Arc Search isn't quite the right fit, the closest alternatives are perplexity , you-com , and genspark . See our full Arc Search alternatives page for side-by-side comparisons.