Browser-first capture

also known as: consumer-UI capture

Rendering the actual consumer-facing app or page in a real browser session and reading the result, instead of calling a vendor’s sanitized model API and presenting that as equivalent. The two are not interchangeable: a model API answer skips whatever ranking, presentation, ads and UI-level behavior the real product applies, so it is not what a real user of that surface actually sees.

In AI Search API

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and every Google surface here are captured browser-first, a stealth-browser session loads the real UI, submits the prompt, and the rendered result is normalized into the Envelope. Claude is the one live exception today, served through the official Anthropic API; its model provenance (provenance.model) makes the source clear. Login-walled surfaces that browser-first cannot yet reach anonymously are the phase-2 roadmap, not a silent substitution. Every capture carries provenance, the model, whether it web-searched, and the requested-vs-effective region, on the same versioned Envelope.

Envelope excerpt, marking an API-sourced capture

"provenance": {
  "official": true,
  "model": { "providerId": "claude-sonnet-4-5", "inferred": false }
}

Related terms

See it in the product

Every definition here is enforced in the Envelope contract. Run a capture and read the fields yourself.

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