Comet, Perplexity’s AI-powered web browser, is available now for people paying for the company’s $200 per month Perplexity Max subscription. The company offered the browser in a beta form for select Windows users in June, but now it’ll join Google Chrome and The Browser Company’s Dia in incorporating AI models directly into web browsing experience.
At its simplest, Comet is a streamlined browser (built on Chrome’s browser tech) that uses Perplexity as its default search engine. At any point you can call up the company’s AI in a sidebar to ask questions, summarize text, and critical to the company’s pitch for the future of AI, take actions for you, like sending an email, looking up directions on Google Maps or purchasing a product.
Perplexity’s search results pull information from the web into AI-generated answer, just like ChatGPT or Gemini, with all of the doubts around accuracy that implies. Like its competitors, Perplexity has crawled the web for training data to feed its AI and has even been sued by publications for allegedly allowing its search engine to reproduce news articles in their entirety when prompted.
The company has been open about its interest to use web browsers to collect customer data for target ads. Perplexity even wants to purchase Chrome, assuming Google is forced to spin it off as a result of its antitrust trial. Whether or not that happens, Comet affirms the tech industry’s interest in making the web browser the default interface for AI. As it turns out, browser history makes for an excellent way to get a constant stream of new information about a person that AI can leverage.
Perplexity says it’ll send invites to people on the Comet waitlist over the summer. You can sign up for the waitlist on the company’s website, or pay for Perplexity Max and use the new browser right now.
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