Perplexity to Offer Comet Plus Subscription for $5 Per Month

Perplexity is adding an inexpensive new Comet Plus subscription to its offerings that will provide 80 percent of its revenues to publishers. It appears that the official announcement will happen later today, but at the time of this writing, all we have to go on is a Bloomberg news report.

“AI is helping to create a better internet, but publishers still need to get paid,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told the publication. “So we think this is actually the right solution, and we’re happy to make adjustments along the way.”

Like other AI chatbot providers, Perplexity has been widely criticized for stealing web content, using it to train its models, and then using it as the basis for the answers it provides to customers for free or with paid subscriptions. In fact, it’s stolen my content without permission or payment. So Comet Plus is an olive branch of sorts to content creators, albeit one that’s arriving well after the foundational thefts that created Perplexity’s business model in the first place.

According to Bloomberg, Perplexity has allocated $42.5 million to distribute to publishers that join its program. These publishers will receive 80 percent of the revenues that the company generates from Comet Plus, which costs $5 per month and gives subscribers access to what Perplexity calls a curated selection of content. As the name suggests, this new offering is tied to its web browser, Comet, and not its Perplexity AI chatbot.

Perplexity launched its AI-powered Comet web browser in early July for members of its $200-per-month Perplexity Max subscription. Since then, it has expanded the availability of Comet to a limited set of free users by invitation and to Perplexity Pro members in the U.S. and all Perplexity Enterprise Pro members. I’ve spent the past month reviewing various AI-powered web browsers, and Comet is, at least for now, the most sophisticated and impressive.

$42.5 million may or may not be a lot of money, but it’s worth remembering that Perplexity offered Google $34.5 billion to acquire the Chrome web browser.

“We have yet to hear back from Google,” Srinivas told Bloomberg.