Browser advertising becomes a critical advantage in the Zero-Click Era: VEVE Report

In a digital landscape reshaped by AI Overviews and falling CTRs, VEVE’s latest India Edition of the Guide to Browser Advertising positions browser start pages as one of the most reliable and impact-ready surfaces for marketers in 2025. The key finding, that nine in ten journeys driven through VEVE are incremental, sets the tone for why browser visibility is fast becoming a must-have in media plans where brands need to capture intent before it fully forms.

The report opens by examining the pressures facing traditional channels. Search, social, and display continue to absorb inflated CPMs, shrinking attention spans, signal loss across platforms, and broad adoption of ad-blocking. As competition intensifies and on-screen environments become crowded, marketers are increasingly searching for channels that offer presence without noise, scale without complexity, and intent without dependency on click-led paths. VEVE frames this shift as a natural progression toward surfaces where discovery is organic and measurement does not rely on third-party signals.

That’s where browsers move from optional to essential. With 5.1 billion global users and deep penetration in India through ecosystems like JioSphere, My Browser, Super Browser, and OEM-native browsers across OPPO, vivo, and Xiaomi, the browser start page has become the real digital front door, users’ first touchpoint before any search, scroll, or click. The guide positions this environment as a proven, high-intent, brand-safe, and stable channel, not an emerging experiment, already driving measurable outcomes for Indian advertisers. For marketers unfamiliar with the space, the guide also simplifies the landscape through a glossary of tiles, doodles, shortcuts, and notifications so the planning process feels intuitive rather than technical.

VEVE further maps ten browser archetypes, from default and AI-driven browsers to privacy-first, lightweight, and gaming-led interfaces, illustrating how user intent changes with usage behaviour. This becomes critical for marketers identifying where browsers sit in their media mix. The guide provides a decision lens for opportunities such as capturing pre-search intent, building top-of-journey visibility, driving discovery for new launches, and strengthening mid-to-lower funnel outcomes, especially when paired with VEVE’s audience-first targeting.

Fragmentation remains one of the industry’s biggest concerns. With over 200 browsers worldwide, advertisers often face inconsistent formats, compliance differences, and operational inefficiencies. VEVE positions its platform as the infrastructure layer that resolves these challenges through exclusive browser partnerships, machine-learning optimisation, privacy-first processes, and transparent real-time reporting. With reach across 420M OEM smartphone users in India, VEVE offers a unified workflow that simplifies planning and guarantees 100% viewable, on-device inventory, removing the need for complex integrations or manual scaling.

The guide also touches on the formats defining browser advertising today: persistent tiles, high-impact doodles and splash screens, native in-feed units, and notification-led formats used for moment-based communication. Categories such as e-commerce, BFSI, travel, and F&B continue to see strong traction. VEVE offers a glimpse into impact, referencing how Flipkart drove 93x ROAS through browser placements, while brands like Nestlé, Kotak Mahindra, and Expedia unlocked discovery and performance in ways other channels currently struggle to match.

The report concludes with a clear message: as zero-click behaviour grows and user journeys become less linear, browser start pages are shifting from peripheral placements to strategic anchors in media planning. Browsers offer what few channels can now promise, immediate intent, measurable outcomes, and a dependable environment in a fragmented digital world.

You can download the full report here.