Definition
Perplexity Comet is an AI browser made by Perplexity. It is built on Chromium and includes the Comet Assistant, which can answer questions about the pages you have open, search with Perplexity's answer engine and carry out multi-step tasks such as comparing prices or filling in forms on the user's behalf.
Comet launched in July 2025 for subscribers to the $200-per-month Perplexity Max plan. On October 2, 2025 Perplexity made it free for everyone, and on March 18, 2026 it released Comet for iOS, which means the browser now runs on Mac, Windows, Android and iOS. A related paid tier, Comet Plus, costs $5 per month (included in Pro and Max) and gives subscribers access to content from participating publishers. Perplexity says it passes 80% of Comet Plus revenue to those publishers, allocated by human visits, search citations and agent actions.
Comet changes how a visit reaches your site in three ways:
- Answers replace some clicks. A user can ask the assistant about a page, or a topic, and get a cited answer without opening every source.
- The assistant visits pages for the user. Tasks like 'find the cheapest plan that includes SSO' mean the agent reads pricing pages, comparison tables and docs, then reports back. The person may never see your layout.
- Logged-in context. Because Comet runs in the user's own browser session, the assistant can act on sites where the user is signed in, which makes it more capable than a cloud crawler and also riskier.
That last point made Comet a reference case for prompt injection. In August 2025, Brave published research showing that hidden instructions in a Reddit comment could make Comet's assistant read a user's email and leak a one-time password when the user asked it to summarize the page. Perplexity responded with classifiers that scan retrieved content before the assistant acts, clearer boundaries between user instructions and page content, and confirmation steps for sensitive actions.
For GEO, Comet is a version of agentic search. The assistant favors pages it can parse quickly: prices, specifications, plan limits and policies stated in plain HTML text, not hidden behind tabs, images or scripts that need interaction. A product whose key facts are only shown in a pricing calculator or a PDF is harder for any agent to report accurately.
Measurement is harder than for crawlers. Perplexity's crawler documentation lists only PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User and does not document a separate Comet user agent, so browsing done in Comet can be difficult to tell apart from ordinary Chrome traffic in logs. Treat it as part of AI dark traffic: watch referrals from perplexity.ai, unusual navigation patterns on pricing and comparison pages, and whether Perplexity answers cite you for the questions Comet users are likely to ask. Comet's main competitor is OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas, and optimizing for one generally helps with the other.
Examples of Perplexity Comet
- A shopper asks the Comet Assistant to compare the return policies of three running-shoe stores. It reads each store's policy page and returns a short table, and the store whose policy is buried in a PDF is listed as 'unclear'.
- A SaaS company moves its plan limits from an interactive calculator into a plain HTML table after testing found Comet's assistant misreporting which plan includes SSO.
- A security team at a bank adds Comet to its threat model after reading Brave's prompt injection research and tightens confirmation steps on account actions.
- A news publisher joins Comet Plus and receives payouts based on how often its articles are visited, cited in answers or used by the assistant to complete tasks.
