Perplexity Comet is an AI browser that turns web browsing from something you do into something you delegate. Instead of opening tabs and clicking through pages yourself, you ask a built-in assistant to read, compare, and act for you. It is one of the most interesting products to come out of the AI race, and one of the most argued about.
What follows is what it does, what it costs, whether it is safe to use, and what an agentic browser means for your site. Current as of June 2026.
What Is Perplexity Comet?
Perplexity Comet is a web browser built by Perplexity, the company behind the AI answer engine of the same name. It is built on Chromium, the same open-source base as Google Chrome, so it looks and behaves like Chrome and imports your existing bookmarks and extensions. The difference sits in a sidebar: an AI assistant that can see the page you are on, read across your open tabs, and act on what it finds.
That assistant is what makes Comet an "agentic" browser rather than a browser with a chatbot bolted on. A normal browser waits for you to click. Comet's assistant can do the clicking for you. The pitch is a shift from navigation to delegation, and we cover the broader pattern in our guide to agentic AI.
There is one point of confusion worth clearing up early, because people search for "Comet vs Perplexity" as if they are rivals. They are not. Comet is the browser. Perplexity is the answer engine that lives inside it, the same one you can use on the Perplexity website or app. Comet is Perplexity's attempt to own the whole browsing surface, not just the search box.
Comet first launched for Windows and macOS on July 9, 2025, then reached Android on November 20, 2025, and the iPhone on March 18, 2026. Perplexity's framing is direct: it wants to take browsing back from Chrome, with AI as the default way you interact with the web rather than an add-on.
What Can Comet Actually Do?
The core feature is the sidecar assistant, a panel that opens alongside whatever you are reading. You can ask it about the current page, have it summarize an article, a PDF, or a YouTube video, and ask questions that pull context from several open tabs at once. For research and reading, this is the part most people find genuinely useful.
Beyond reading, Comet can act. Connect a Google account and the assistant gets read and write access to Gmail and Calendar, so it can answer questions about your schedule, dig through your inbox, or draft replies. Give it a higher-level instruction like "compare these three laptops" or "find a direct flight that morning," and it will visit sites, pull details, and work through the steps. It can also fill forms and build shopping carts.
Here is the distinction the marketing skips. The free sidecar can run these tasks interactively, while you watch it work and step in when it gets stuck. What you pay for is autonomy. Perplexity Pro upgrades the agent's underlying model, and the Max plan adds the Background Assistant, which grinds through a to-do list on its own while you do something else.
And the agent is not reliable yet. One power user described a roughly 90% success rate on well-described tasks, which sounds fine until you realize that one in ten attempts fails, often halfway through, on anything involving logins, JavaScript-heavy pages, or precise form-filling. Reviewers who pushed harder reported failure rates closer to a third on delegated multi-step jobs. People also report Comet eating memory once the AI is active, and reviewers note there is little visible record of what the agent did, so a task that goes wrong is hard to debug. Treat it as a fast junior assistant you still have to watch, not an autopilot.
Is Perplexity Comet Free?
Yes, with a caveat. Comet was gated behind Perplexity's $200-per-month Max plan when it launched in July 2025, and the waitlist reportedly ran into the millions. That changed on October 2, 2025, when Perplexity made Comet a free download worldwide, with no subscription and no regional gate.
So the "Comet costs $200 a month" line you may still see is out of date. The browser and the sidecar assistant are free. What the paid tiers add is the autonomous Background Assistant, higher usage limits, and Comet Plus, a $5-per-month bundle of content from publishers like CNN, The Washington Post, and Fortune that Perplexity pitches as an AI-flavored alternative to Apple News.
| Tier | Cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Comet (free) | $0 | The browser plus the sidecar assistant: summarize, chat with tabs, basic tasks |
| Comet Plus | $5/mo | Premium publisher content inside answers (also included with Pro and Max) |
| Perplexity Pro | $20/mo | Higher limits, advanced models, Comet Plus included |
| Perplexity Max | $200/mo | The autonomous Background Assistant, top usage limits, priority models |
Comet runs on Windows 10 and later, macOS Big Sur and later, Android 12 and later, and iOS 18 and later. You download it from perplexity.ai/comet or the mobile app stores, sign in with a Perplexity account, and import your bookmarks and extensions from Chrome. On the iPhone the app is a free download, with Pro and Max available as in-app purchases.
Is Perplexity Comet Safe?
This is where it gets uncomfortable. Comet's design creates a security problem that a normal browser does not have, and it has been demonstrated by more than one research team.
The problem is indirect prompt injection. When you ask Comet to summarize a page, it feeds that page's content to its language model, and it does not reliably tell the difference between your instructions and instructions hidden inside the page. So a web page, an email, or a calendar invite can carry text that the assistant treats as a command. Because the agent acts inside your logged-in sessions, that command can do real damage.
Brave's security team showed this in August 2025: they reported a working attack on July 25, Perplexity shipped a fix on July 27, the issue looked patched by August 13, and the details went public on August 20. Then LayerX disclosed "CometJacking", where a single crafted link tells the assistant to pull data from connected services like Gmail, encode it in base64 to slip past Perplexity's safeguards, and send it to an attacker. Perplexity initially marked that report as having no security impact. The attacks kept coming. Trail of Bits published a threat-modeling audit, and in early 2026 Zenity Labs demonstrated a version triggered by a single calendar invite: once Comet processed the invite, the agent could read local files and pull credentials from an open 1Password session. Perplexity has since blocked that path with hard file-access boundaries.
Two common takes get this wrong. First, "it is just Chrome with a chatbot, so it is no riskier": the agent reading your tabs and acting in your sessions is a genuinely new attack surface. Second, "Perplexity said there was no security impact, so it is overblown" does not hold when five independent teams have demonstrated working prompt-injection exploits, several of them exfiltrating user data in proof-of-concept attacks. Perplexity has since added defenses, including a classifier that screens page content before the agent acts, and the disclosed exploits were patched as they surfaced. But indirect prompt injection is an unsolved class of problem, not a single bug, and new variants keep surfacing.
One privacy point worth correcting: when AI features are on, the page content is processed on Perplexity's servers, not locally, despite some reviews implying otherwise.
Until prompt injection is solved, do not run Comet's agent in a session where it has access to banking, health records, or work systems. Keep the connected accounts minimal, and review anything it does in a logged-in tab. Summarizing pages with no accounts connected is far lower risk than handing the agent your inbox.
Perplexity Comet vs ChatGPT Atlas vs Chrome
Comet is not the only AI browser anymore. OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas on October 21, 2025, macOS first, with its agent mode tied to paid ChatGPT plans. Google has gone the other way, adding Gemini into Chrome rather than building a new browser around it.
The cleanest way to think about Comet versus Atlas is what each one is built to do. Comet leans toward research: it is strong at reading a page, synthesizing across tabs, and showing you cited sources, which is a natural extension of Perplexity's answer engine. Atlas leans toward action: it is built around driving tasks and automating workflows. A useful shorthand is that Atlas is for automating and Comet is for annotating. Both share the same prompt-injection risk, because both let an AI act on web content.
| Perplexity Comet | ChatGPT Atlas | Chrome | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maker | Perplexity | OpenAI | |
| Launched | July 9, 2025 | October 21, 2025 | 2008 |
| Built on | Chromium | Chromium | Chromium |
| AI approach | AI is the core; research and citation focus | AI is the core; task and automation focus | Gemini added as an assistant |
| Agent cost | Background Assistant on Max ($200/mo) | Agent mode on paid ChatGPT | Limited |
If you live in Perplexity for research, Comet is the natural fit. If you mostly want an agent to grind through tasks, Atlas is built for it. Neither is ready to be your only browser, and you can read our take on Perplexity against ChatGPT for the engine-level comparison.
What Comet Means for Your Website
If you run a site, the important thing about Comet is not whether you use it. It is that your visitors do, and their agent shows up in your data looking like a person.
When someone delegates a task, the interactive agent loads your pages as ordinary Chromium, from the user's own device and inside their session. It does not announce itself the way Perplexity's declared crawlers do, so it does not show up as PerplexityBot or the Perplexity-User agent that you can filter for in your logs. It looks like a normal visit. The result, as HUMAN Security's analysis puts it, is traffic that comes from genuine human intent but executes at automated speed. The tell is behavioral: fast, dense, systematic navigation with few idle pauses, and a lot of it landing in your Direct or unattributed bucket in GA4.
The instinct to block it is usually wrong, because behind the agent is a real customer trying to do something. The better move is to classify rather than block: let agents read and navigate, gate the state-changing actions like checkout or account changes, and watch the behavioral signals. The same logic is now playing out in agentic commerce, where Amazon escalated from a November 2025 legal threat to a lawsuit and won a March 2026 court order blocking Comet from shopping on Amazon, arguing the agent accessed its store without authorization. An appeals court paused that order days later, and the case is still being fought.
In our experience, the brands that handle this well stop thinking about ranking alone and start thinking about being citable. Comet rewards content an assistant can read and lift cleanly into its sidebar: clear structure, answer-first passages, and pages that AI crawlers can actually reach. That is the same discipline behind optimizing for Perplexity and tracking whether AI engines mention you.
Should You Use Perplexity Comet?
If you are curious about where browsing is heading, Comet is worth a look, and the free sidecar assistant for summarizing and tab research is the lowest-risk way in. If you mostly read and research, you will get value from day one.
If you need reliability, or you spend your day in banking, healthcare, or anything with sensitive logged-in sessions, wait. The agent is not dependable enough to trust unsupervised, and the security questions are real and unresolved. There is no harm in keeping Chrome as your daily driver and trying Comet on the side.
The bigger shift is the one underneath all of this. As assistants start reading and acting on the web for people, the question stops being where you rank and becomes whether your content is the thing they read, trust, and quote.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Perplexity's Comet? Comet is an AI browser made by Perplexity, built on Chromium. It puts an AI assistant in a sidebar that can summarize the page you are on, answer questions across your open tabs, and carry out tasks like comparing products or filling forms. It launched in July 2025 and became a free download in October 2025.
Is Comet from Perplexity free? Yes. The browser and the sidecar assistant are free with no subscription, since October 2, 2025. Paid Perplexity plans add extras: the autonomous Background Assistant on the $200-per-month Max plan, and Comet Plus ($5 per month) for premium publisher content.
Is Perplexity the same as Comet? No. Perplexity is the AI answer engine, available on its website and app. Comet is Perplexity's web browser, with that same engine and an assistant built into it. You can use Perplexity without Comet, but Comet is built around Perplexity.
Is Perplexity Comet safe to use? For low-stakes reading and summarizing, the risk is modest. For agentic tasks, be careful. Researchers at Brave, LayerX, Trail of Bits, Zenity, and Guardio have all demonstrated prompt-injection attacks where hidden instructions on a page hijack the assistant. Avoid running the agent in sessions with banking, health, or work data until the issue is better solved.
What is the difference between Perplexity Comet and ChatGPT Atlas? Both are Chromium-based AI browsers. Comet leans toward research and citation, fitting Perplexity's answer-engine roots. ChatGPT Atlas, from OpenAI, leans toward automating tasks. A shorthand: Atlas is for automating, Comet is for annotating. Both carry the same prompt-injection risk.
What devices and platforms support Comet? Comet runs on Windows 10 and later, macOS Big Sur and later, Android 12 and later, and iOS 18 and later. It launched on Windows and macOS on July 9, 2025, Android on November 20, 2025, and iPhone on March 18, 2026.
The Takeaway
Comet is a real preview of where browsing is going, not a finished product. It is free, it is genuinely useful for research, and it is not safe to hand your inbox to yet. Whether or not you adopt it, your visitors will, and their agents are already reading your site.
That changes the job. The pages that win the agentic web are the ones an assistant can reach, read, and quote without friction. You can check whether AI agents and crawlers can actually read your site in a couple of minutes. geotoolbox is the AI bot debugger for SEOs, built to show you exactly what Comet, ChatGPT, and the rest see when they look at your pages.
Sources
- Comet (browser) - Wikipedia (engine, platform launch dates)
- Perplexity's Comet AI browser now free; Max users get new Background Assistant - TechCrunch
- Agentic browser security: indirect prompt injection in Perplexity Comet - Brave
- CometJacking: one click can turn Comet against you - LayerX
- Using threat modeling and prompt injection to audit Comet - Trail of Bits
- PleaseFix: zero-click agent hijacking in Comet - Zenity Labs
- What is Perplexity Comet and why is it on my website? - HUMAN Security
- Amazon sends legal threats to Perplexity over agentic browsing - TechCrunch
- OpenAI launches an AI-powered browser: ChatGPT Atlas - TechCrunch