Perplexity has quietly become one of the most important AI players for news. The company now reports 22 million monthly active users, 2 million daily active users, and Reuters Digital News Report 2025 found 1% of their entire survey cohort use Perplexity to discover news.

If that ratio holds, that’s 2.2 million people a month engaging with journalism through Perplexity. Not to be sniffed at.

Catching up

Perplexity was the first large language model to introduce a scalable publisher partnership programme. Yet its original terms were largely untenable for most news companies, and few signed on.

At the same time, Perplexity has been accused of sidestepping publisher blocks by pulling from third-party AI scrapers, meaning content often appears even when outlets explicitly opt out.

Now, the company has a new product, AI browser Comet, and a new publisher programme, Comet Plus. Before looking at the economics, it’s worth understanding what’s different about this browser.

The AI browser

I recently wrote about AI browsers using Dia (from The Browser Company), here, as an example. Both Dia and Comet point to a future where browsers are no longer passive tools to display content but AI-first workspaces.

Here are two examples of Comet in use:

Firstly, I looked for news. It had been a big news day (it feels like every day is a big news day in the United States right now), and I wanted to find out more. My query is top left in the image below, and a follow-up question is in the assistant on the right (both Dia and Comet follow the same layout):

As you see, everything is in the “search” screen on the left and the “assistant” on the right. As with Dia, ChatGPT advanced versions, and other AI, there is a running list (shown in the assistant) as the system “thinks” about the question I have asked:

I got a pretty comprehensive response to my question. Sources are noted at the top of the assistant, although it is hard to make out specific brands, and in links next to each point. It’s doubtful these links get much traffic through, and branding of sources is not shown. 

Next I wanted to try something with a multi-step approach. The easiest way to do that is through dinner ideas (bear with me on this):

Then referencing different tabs, I wanted to see if I could get it to add ingredients to my Whole Foods order. This is agentic AI — carrying out steps on behalf of the user:

Naturally I had to login. But once I did, it ran through the list, showing the “thinking,” and added every item into the cart:

Given this is the very first attempt, I was pretty impressed. It took a while, but it got there. And I could leave it running in the background.  

The AI browser wars

It’s not just Perplexity and The Browser Company launching AI browsers. Here’s a quick summary of what we know so far:

• Comet is more agent-based, designed to complete multi-step tasks (bookings, purchases, drafting e-mails) directly in the browser.

• Dia, now part of Atlassian, focuses more on seamless productivity — summarising, writing, and planning within tabs.

• Anthropic has rolled out a limited research preview of Claude for Chrome, where the AI assistant can see your browser screen, fill forms, click buttons, and perform tasks directly within Chrome — effectively a lightweight AI browser interface. It seems to only be available to 1,000 “Max Plan” users as a beta

• Google apparently has a deeper AI agent under development, capable of planning and executing complex tasks, such as shopping or form filling, within Chrome. Currently accessible via AI Pro/Ultra plans in the U.S. and intended for integration into Google Search’s AI Mode.

• Rumours swirl that OpenAI will soon launch its own browser (Aura).

For each browser, I constantly get notifications prompting me to make this “the default browser.” That’s the battleground to get to scale, and the push has only just started.

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