Perplexity Comet
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Comet is an AI-powered web browser developed by Perplexity AI. It is built on the Chromium open-source project and ships with an integrated AI assistant that can summarise pages, answer questions about open tabs, take actions on a user's behalf, and run multi-step research workflows directly inside the browser window. Comet was first released on July 9, 2025 for Microsoft Windows and macOS, initially restricted to subscribers of the company's $200 per month Perplexity Max plan and to a small number of waitlist invitees [1][2].
After a three-month limited rollout, Perplexity made the browser a free download worldwide on October 2, 2025, removing the paywall and the waitlist at the same time [3][4]. The Android version followed on November 20, 2025, and the iOS build was released on March 18, 2026 [5][6]. By the free release, the waitlist had reportedly grown to "millions" of people, and Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity's co-founder and CEO, publicly compared the response to the early days of Gmail [3][7]. By mid-2026 Srinivas was telling reporters the company was aiming for "tens to hundreds of millions" of Comet users by year end, with Comet on mobile already past one million downloads in the months after launch [40][41].
Comet sits at the centre of a wider race to rethink the browser around AI agents. It launched several months before OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas and competes with Dia browser from The Browser Company and Arc Search. From August 2025 onward, security researchers at Brave, LayerX, and later Zenity Labs published a series of prompt injection attacks against Comet, which surfaced risks specific to agentic browsers and prompted Perplexity to ship a string of mitigations through 2025 and into 2026 [8][9][10][42].
Perplexity AI was founded in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. Its first product was an "answer engine" that combined a search index with large language models to return cited responses to natural language questions. By late 2024 the company had raised multiple funding rounds at rising valuations and grown into a mainstream alternative to Google Search for many heavy AI users [11]. From mid-2024 onward, Srinivas signalled publicly that Perplexity wanted to expand beyond the answer engine into a full browser. In an April 2025 interview with TechCrunch he said owning the browser would give the company a place to run AI agents with real access to the user's tabs, cookies, and accounts. The same interview drew criticism for his comments about how a Perplexity browser could track everything a user did online for the sake of "hyper personalised" ads, which set the stage for some of the privacy concerns that later attached to Comet [12].
By March 2026 Perplexity's annualised recurring revenue had passed $450 million and the company served tens of thousands of enterprise clients, with roughly 11% of organisations using generative AI tools reporting some Perplexity adoption. Comet sat alongside Perplexity Search, Perplexity Pro, Perplexity Max, and the enterprise tier as the company's most visible consumer surface in 2026 [43][44].
Perplexity's bet with Comet, articulated by Srinivas in launch interviews, was that a generation of new browsers built around AI agents could carve out share by changing what a browser does, not how it renders pages. A traditional browser is a window onto websites; an agentic browser is a worker that uses websites for you [2][13]. This put Comet in competition with traditional browsers adding AI features (Chrome with Gemini, Edge with Copilot), AI-native browsers from new entrants (Dia browser, Arc Search), and full-stack AI products that planned their own browsers, including OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas, which arrived in October 2025 [14][15].
Srinivas framed Comet's role inside Perplexity as the long-term distribution layer, on the theory that whoever owns the browser owns the default for searches, agent actions, and identity. In an October 2025 CNBC interview he argued Comet would let companies become more productive without hiring more people, a claim that drew both interest and criticism from labour-market commentators [45].
Comet's rollout happened in clear stages from the paid release on July 9, 2025 through to the iOS launch in March 2026 and the security-focused updates that followed.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| July 9, 2025 | Windows and macOS launch, restricted to Perplexity Max subscribers ($200/month) and selected waitlist invitees [1][2] |
| July 22, 2025 | Srinivas says the waitlist has doubled in two weeks; invites start rolling out more broadly [7] |
| August 11, 2025 | Brave reports the first major indirect prompt injection vulnerability to Perplexity privately [8] |
| August 20, 2025 | Brave publicly discloses the vulnerability; Perplexity ships an initial patch and publishes a mitigation post [8][46] |
| August 2025 | Perplexity introduces Comet Plus, a $5/month publisher subscription bundled inside the browser [16] |
| October 2, 2025 | Worldwide free release; waitlist removed; Background Assistant announced for Max subscribers [3][4] |
| October 2025 | LayerX discloses the "CometJacking" URL-based prompt injection attack [9] |
| November 20, 2025 | Android version released [5] |
| February 2026 | Perplexity ships further mitigations for prompt injection issues previously reported by Zenity Labs [42] |
| March 18, 2026 | iOS version released; Comet now available on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS [6] |
| March 2026 | Comet rises to #3 overall on the U.S. iOS App Store, then drops out of the top rankings within days as new security disclosures circulate [41][47] |
| March 2026 | Zenity Labs discloses the "PleaseFix" zero-click agent hijack family of vulnerabilities; OECD AI Incidents Monitor logs the disclosure [42][48] |
Comet's first release on July 9, 2025 was limited. To install the browser you had to either subscribe to Perplexity Max, the company's top-tier plan at $200 per month, or have an invite from the waitlist. Perplexity explained the rationale as a way to control load on the agent backend and gather feedback before opening the doors [1][2].
The response was strong enough that Srinivas drew Gmail comparisons within the first week. "Comet invite demand gives me the early Gmail launch vibes," he wrote on LinkedIn, adding that the waitlist had doubled in two weeks and invites would start going out from July 22, 2025 [7].
On October 2, 2025, Perplexity made Comet a free download for any Perplexity account holder, anywhere in the world, with no waitlist [3][4]. The same announcement introduced Background Assistant for Max subscribers, which lets the AI work on multiple tasks asynchronously rather than tying up the foreground browser session [4][17].
The free release was widely read as a response to the imminent arrival of OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas later in the same month and Google's continued push to integrate Gemini into Chrome [3][14]. Srinivas posted a needling "O hey hi Chrome" line on social media that day, framing the price drop as a shot at Google [18].
Comet for Android arrived on November 20, 2025, bringing most desktop features to phones, including a default assistant, voice mode, tab summarisation, and a built-in ad blocker [5]. The iOS build followed on March 18, 2026, completing the cross-platform rollout. With iOS, Comet was available on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS, though it had no official Linux build at the time of writing [6][41].
Mobile traction was unusually visible. Perplexity said Comet had passed one million mobile downloads by early 2026, helped along by aggressive marketing inside the existing Perplexity app and by Srinivas's repeated framing of the browser as Chrome's challenger on phones [40][49]. On iOS the new browser briefly climbed to #3 overall on the U.S. App Store charts within a week of release, only to slide out of the top rankings later in the same month as the March prompt injection disclosures hit the press and reviewers flagged stability issues [41][47].
The Comet experience is built around an AI assistant that is always one keystroke away. The browser also adds a sidebar, a set of "sidekick" prompts that turn the assistant into a focused tool, and an agent that can take actions on websites with the user's permission.
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
| Comet Assistant (sidebar) | A persistent right-side sidebar that can read all open tabs, summarise pages, answer questions, draft text, and chain follow-up queries with cited sources [19][20] |
| Cross-tab awareness | The assistant can reason over the contents of multiple tabs at once, for example comparing flight options across three booking sites without the user pasting anything [19][20] |
| Comet Agent (agentic browsing) | A more autonomous mode that clicks buttons, fills forms, and navigates websites on the user's behalf to complete tasks like booking appointments or shopping [13][21] |
| Background Assistant | Introduced October 2, 2025, restricted to Perplexity Max subscribers, runs longer tasks asynchronously in the background while the user continues working [4][17] |
| Sidekicks | Pre-built assistant configurations for narrow tasks (research, writing, shopping, coding) that bias the assistant's behaviour for that domain [22] |
| Voice mode | Spoken conversation with the assistant, available on desktop and on the Android and iOS builds [5][6] |
| Comet Plus | A $5/month publisher bundle, included free with Perplexity Pro and Max, that gives the assistant licensed access to paywalled content from launch partners including CNN, Conde Nast, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Le Monde, and Le Figaro [16][23] |
| Chrome extension support | Most existing Chrome extensions install and run inside Comet, with the exception of those that replace the new tab page [24] |
| Built-in ad blocker | Default on the Android build [5] |
| Perplexity Computer integration | Max subscribers can hand off long-running browser tasks to Perplexity Computer, the cloud agent that bundles a virtual machine, browser, and credit-metered runtime [43] |
The Comet Assistant is the headline feature. It appears as a sidebar that slides in from the right edge of the browser and stays available across pages and tabs. The user can type or speak a question, and the assistant answers using a mix of the active tab, other open tabs, and a live Perplexity search [19][20]. It is not just a chat panel; it can be asked to act, for example to summarise an article, pull out the price column from a comparison page, draft an email, or open three tabs and compare their contents. Perplexity's documentation distinguishes a lighter "Comet Assistant" that reads and writes from a more autonomous "Comet Agent" that can also click and navigate [21].
Where the assistant ends and the agent begins is a matter of capability rather than a separate product. When the user asks Comet to do something that requires acting on a webpage, the assistant escalates into an agentic mode that drives the browser. It can click buttons, type into inputs, and follow flows across multiple pages, sometimes without further user input [13][21]. This defines the agentic browser category. It is also responsible for most of the security risks discussed below, because the agent runs with the user's full logged-in session and can therefore touch anything the user could touch.
Sidekicks are named, scoped configurations of the assistant. Perplexity ships sidekicks for deep research, shopping, and travel planning; a sidekick essentially pre-loads the assistant with a goal and a set of preferred behaviours so the user does not have to re-prompt for context [22]. Background Assistant, introduced October 2, 2025 alongside the free release, lets Perplexity Max subscribers fire off a task and continue working while the agent runs in the background, reporting back when done [4][17].
Perplexity introduced Comet Plus in August 2025 as a publisher-revenue programme inside the browser. The subscription is $5 per month standalone, or included free with Perplexity Pro and Max [16][23]. Comet Plus gives the assistant licensed access to articles from participating publishers and pays them a revenue share based on human reads, citations, and agent actions. Launch partners included CNN, Conde Nast (covering The New Yorker, Wired, Vanity Fair, and Architectural Digest), The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Le Monde, and Le Figaro [16][23][25]. Roughly 80% of Comet Plus revenue is reportedly distributed to publishers [23].
In early 2026 Perplexity extended its Max subscription to include Perplexity Computer, a cloud agent runtime that gives the assistant a dedicated virtual machine with its own browser, file system, and credit budget. Max subscribers can hand off Comet tasks to Computer, which then runs them inside an isolated cloud environment rather than in the user's local browser session. The integration was positioned as a way to escape some of the security trade-offs of running agents directly in the user's logged-in browser, since a compromised Computer task cannot read the local user's cookies and tabs [43][44].
Comet is a Chromium-based browser, which means it inherits the Blink rendering engine, the V8 JavaScript engine, and most of the plumbing of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge [24][26]. Web pages render the same way they do in Chrome, and most existing Chrome extensions work without modification. Perplexity's stated rationale for going with Chromium rather than building from scratch was time-to-market and compatibility [24].
On top of Chromium, Comet layers a sidebar UI that gives the assistant a persistent home outside the active tab, a messaging bridge that lets the assistant read DOM content from open tabs and inject actions back into them, an agent runtime that orchestrates multi-step actions, and connections to Perplexity's cloud backend that route assistant queries to one or more large language models and to the company's live search index.
Perplexity has not published a fully detailed list of which models power which features, and the mix has shifted over time. Public materials and reviewer coverage indicate the assistant draws on a combination of Perplexity's own Sonar models and frontier models from third-party providers, including Anthropic's Claude family and OpenAI's GPT models, with model selection varying by task and subscription tier [20][27]. Max subscribers get access to a wider menu of models than free users.
Because Comet is Chromium-based, the vast majority of Chrome extensions install and run inside it. The one documented exception is extensions that replace the new tab page, since Comet uses that surface for its own assistant entry point [24].
At the time of writing, Comet ships on four platforms, with no official Linux build.
| Platform | First release | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| macOS | July 9, 2025 | Requires recent macOS versions; one of the two launch platforms [1] |
| Windows | July 9, 2025 | Windows 10 or later; one of the two launch platforms [1] |
| Android | November 20, 2025 | Includes voice mode, ad blocker, and tab-aware assistant [5] |
| iOS | March 18, 2026 | Brings feature parity with Android for the assistant and most agentic flows [6][41] |
| Linux | Not officially released | Not supported by Perplexity at the time of writing |
The Android version was notable for including a built-in ad blocker by default, an unusual choice for a Chromium-based browser tied to Google's ad ecosystem [5]. iOS arrived later in part because Apple's WebKit-only rule forces all third-party iOS browsers to use Safari's rendering engine rather than Chromium's Blink, which required Perplexity to re-implement parts of the agent layer for the iOS sandbox [6].
Comet's agentic features have generated as much security research as user enthusiasm. The core problem is structural: an AI assistant that can read and act on web content, while logged in as the user, is also an AI assistant that will follow instructions hidden inside that web content if it cannot tell instructions from data. This class of attack is called indirect prompt injection, and Comet was one of the first products at scale where researchers could demonstrate it in the wild [8][28]. By mid-2026 the timeline of disclosures and patches in Comet had become one of the case studies most often cited in academic and industry writing on agentic browser safety [42][50].
On August 20, 2025, Brave's security team publicly disclosed an indirect prompt injection vulnerability in Comet [8]. The researchers had reported the issue to Perplexity on August 11 and wrote the disclosure post after testing on August 13 suggested an initial patch had been shipped. The mechanism was simple: when a Comet user asked the assistant to summarise a webpage, the assistant fed the page content to the model without reliably distinguishing user instructions from text on the page. An attacker who could place text on the page (via a comment, a hidden HTML element, or an embedded forum post) could instruct the assistant to do almost anything the user could do, including reading authenticated content from other origins [8][28]. Further testing after the post revealed that Perplexity's initial patch did not fully close the hole, and Brave re-reported the issue. The episode became a frequently cited example of how same-origin protections do not stop agents, because the agent has the user's full session [29][30].
In the same week as Brave's disclosure, Perplexity published a long-form engineering post titled "Mitigating Prompt Injection in Comet," which described its approach as a layered set of controls rather than a single fix. The post listed input separation between trusted user prompts and untrusted page content, a classifier that flags suspicious agent behaviour before execution, confirmation gates on sensitive actions, and isolation of high-risk tasks into the cloud-side runtime that would later become Perplexity Computer. The post was widely read as the company's first detailed acknowledgement that prompt injection was a structural problem rather than a one-off bug [46].
A follow-up Brave post showed the same class of attack worked through screenshots. Comet's assistant lets the user take a screenshot and ask questions about the image. Researchers embedded nearly invisible text inside images (low-contrast pixels, off-screen content) that the multimodal model would read and execute as instructions even though the human user could not see them [10][31].
In early October 2025, LayerX Security disclosed an attack it called CometJacking. A malicious URL contains a query parameter with embedded prompt injection text; when the user clicks the link and Comet's assistant inspects the URL, it follows the injected instructions, which can include reading data from connected services such as Gmail and Google Calendar and exfiltrating it to an attacker-controlled server [9][32]. Other reported vulnerabilities in the same window included an attack that could compromise stored 1Password credentials by tricking the agent into revealing them and an attack that could exfiltrate local files via prompt injection [33][34].
In March 2026, Zenity Labs disclosed a family of critical vulnerabilities it called PleaseFix, which affected several agentic browsers including Comet. The disclosure split into two exploit paths. The first was a zero-click compromise that granted an attacker access to the local file system and allowed data exfiltration while the agent continued returning expected results to the user, so the user saw nothing visibly wrong. The second allowed an attacker to assume agent privileges and abuse agent-authorised workflows, including reading individual credentials stored in 1Password or taking over the 1Password vault entirely. Zenity reported the issues privately to Perplexity in late 2025 and said a fix shipped in February 2026, but argued that some attack surface remained because of default configurations [42][48][50].
The PleaseFix disclosure was also logged by the OECD AI Incidents Monitor, an early sign that regulators and standards bodies were treating prompt injection in agentic browsers as a category-level problem rather than a product-specific bug [48].
Perplexity shipped a sequence of patches over August through October 2025, then a second wave between November 2025 and February 2026, and made changes to how the assistant separates user instructions from untrusted page content. The company also added confirmation prompts before agents take destructive or financially significant actions, hardened the URL parser that triggered CometJacking, and moved more high-risk tasks into the cloud-side runtime that became Perplexity Computer [3][29][42][46]. Some researchers, including Brave's team and Zenity, argued publicly that point patches were not enough and the underlying architecture needed rework before agentic browsing could be considered safe on sensitive accounts [29][30][42]. The practical recommendation from most reviewers as of mid-2026 was to use Comet for research and lightweight automation, but to keep banking, primary email, and password manager accounts out of the browser, since a successful prompt injection in those surfaces could move money, read sensitive mail, or hand over stored credentials [29][30][33][50].
Comet is the most prominent example of a small but fast-growing category of AI-native browsers. The closest comparisons are ChatGPT Atlas, Dia browser, Arc Search, and the AI features increasingly bolted onto Chrome and Edge.
| Browser | Maker | First release | Engine | Default AI | Notable orientation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perplexity Comet | Perplexity AI | July 2025 | Chromium (Blink) | Perplexity Sonar plus third-party frontier models | Research, citations, agentic task automation [1][20] |
| ChatGPT Atlas | OpenAI | October 2025 | Chromium (Blink) | OpenAI GPT models | Task delegation, ChatGPT memory across pages [14][15] |
| Dia browser | The Browser Company | 2025 beta | Chromium (Blink) | Mixed frontier models | Conversational browsing, command-bar focus [15] |
| Arc Search | The Browser Company | 2024 (mobile) | WebKit (iOS) and Blink (Android) | Mixed | Mobile-first "Browse for me" summarisation [15] |
| Chrome with Gemini | Phased through 2024 to 2026 | Blink | Gemini | Search, summaries, and tab assistance grafted onto a traditional browser [14] |
Comet is built around Perplexity's habit of citing sources line by line, which makes it strong at research and weak at pure delegation; reviewers have repeatedly described it as the browser that wants to show its work [27][35]. ChatGPT Atlas leans harder on Agent Mode for autonomous task completion and on persistent ChatGPT memory across sessions [14][15]. Dia focuses on a conversational command bar where the user types instructions instead of URLs. Arc Search is more of a mobile reader companion than a full browser. Chrome's Gemini features live inside an otherwise traditional browser and do not yet match the agentic depth of Comet or Atlas. A recurring observation in side-by-side reviews is that Comet and Atlas are converging functionally, and most reviewers recommend choice on the basis of which company's ecosystem the user already lives in rather than on capability differences [15][35][50].
Public market share figures for AI browsers were still scarce in 2026. Most numbers in circulation were vendor-provided rather than independently audited, and the category was small enough that even "hundreds of millions" of total weekly users across Chrome, Atlas, Comet, and others would have left AI-native browsers in the low single digits of overall browser share. Independent analysts were projecting that AI-first browsers could pick up something in the range of 15 to 20% of total browser usage by the end of 2026, mostly at Chrome's expense, but Q2 2026 data did not yet bear that out [50][51].
Reception of Comet split along three lines: power-user reviewers who found genuine value in the assistant for research and routine web tasks, mainstream reviewers who flagged the price (in the July to October window when Comet was $200 per month) and the unreliability of the agent on complex flows, and security researchers who pointed out that the agentic features came with new and not fully understood risks.
In the early weeks after the July 2025 launch, reviewers at The Neuron Daily, KDnuggets, and Second Talent generally praised Comet's research quality and the assistant's ability to maintain context across multiple tabs, while flagging two recurring problems: agent reliability and price [35][36][37]. TechCrunch's hands-on coverage noted that the agent worked well on simple tasks like summarising a single article, but "quickly falls apart" on multi-step flows and at one point hallucinated incorrect dates while attempting to book airport parking [3][38]. Many reviewers concluded that Comet had clearly displaced their default for serious research, but that they would not yet use it for high-stakes tasks. The Reddit user quoted in one widely shared review who said they were "impressed and unimpressed at the same time" while watching Comet delete emails on their behalf captured the ambivalence: it worked, but it was unclear that the assistant was actually faster or safer than doing it by hand [36][39].
Reviews of the mobile builds in late 2025 and the iOS release in March 2026 followed a similar pattern. Cybernews and other outlets noted that the assistant was genuinely useful as a phone-first research tool, particularly for travel planning and shopping comparisons, but flagged that the agent on mobile was still error-prone for anything involving forms, and that the iOS sandbox limited some of the cross-tab actions that worked on desktop [49][50].
Perplexity has not published Comet user numbers in the same way it publishes its search engine traffic, but the company has said the waitlist hit the millions before the October free release, Comet on mobile crossed one million downloads in the months after the Android and iOS launches, and Srinivas has publicly targeted "tens to hundreds of millions" of users by the end of 2026 [3][40][41]. The decision to drop the price from $200 per month to free three months in is itself a signal: Perplexity needed scale more than subscription revenue, and the free release was framed as a play for the user base that Chrome had taken for granted [3][18]. The October release also added Background Assistant as a Max-only feature, and the 2026 Max plan further bundled Perplexity Computer credits, which preserved a reason to pay $200 per month even while the browser itself became free [4][17][43].
The broader commercial backdrop was that Perplexity itself was growing fast. Annualised recurring revenue passed $450 million by March 2026, the company reported tens of thousands of enterprise clients, and Srinivas had become the youngest billionaire in India on the back of Perplexity's $20 billion valuation [43][44]. Comet was not yet a profit centre on its own, but it was the company's most visible distribution play.
The pre-launch interview in which Srinivas described Comet as a tool that could track everything a user did online for personalised advertising drew sharp criticism before release [12]. Coverage in TechCrunch and other outlets revisited those remarks after the launch, and the August 2025, October 2025, and March 2026 security disclosures gave them fresh weight [12][29][33][42]. Perplexity has since softened the framing and emphasised that Comet operates with user consent and data is not sold, but the early comments still circulate as a reason for some users to keep their most sensitive accounts out of the browser entirely [29][33][50].