Perplexity just opened its Comet browser to everyone

Browsing the modern web often feels like navigating an endless maze of ad trackers, cookie banners, and aggressive checkout funnels. Perplexity thinks it has the cure.

The AI search unicorn officially opened its Comet browser to everyone worldwide for free. When Comet first dropped in limited release on July 9, it was locked behind Perplexity’s $200-a-month Max tier. Millions joined the waitlist anyway, making it one of the most talked-about browser experiments of the year.

A copilot by your side, and workers in the back

For free users, Comet centers on a permanent sidecar AI assistant. As you surf the web, it reads along with you, ready to summarize long articles, answer questions about the current page, or navigate complex sites on your behalf. Perplexity claims that during early testing, new users asked 6 to 18 times more questions on their very first day.

The free package also includes dedicated hubs for Discover, Spaces project tracking, and specialized search tools for shopping, travel, finance, and sports. Perplexity also introduced Comet Plus, a $5 monthly add-on featuring licensed journalism from top publishers, which comes bundled for $20 Pro and $200 Max subscribers.

But the biggest news belongs to those high-end Max users. CEO Aravind Srinivas unveiled Background Assistants, a feature designed to kill the traditional chatbot interface.

Instead of waiting on a single prompt, Background Assistants act like a personal mission control. They run multiple tasks simultaneously and asynchronously in the background. A spokesperson demonstrated asking the assistant to find the cheapest concert tickets, add them to a cart, search direct flights, and draft a confirmation email all at once. You can step away, let the AI handle the grunt work across local apps via improved connectors, and review the dashboard before hitting send.

This builds on last week’s Email Assistant rollout and comes ahead of an upcoming mobile version of Comet that promises hands-free voice interactions.

Why it matters

We think releasing Comet for free proves that AI search engines realize web interfaces are a dead end: if you want to own the search market, you have to own the browser window.

For regular internet users, Comet is easily worth a test drive today. Even without paying $200 a month for the background automation, having an inline assistant that instantly digests messy pages and strips away noise is an immediate productivity upgrade over vanilla Chrome.

However, the real war is agentic browsing. Handing off tedious chores like booking flights or comparing retail prices to background agents is where the industry wants to go. The clever part here is the mission-control model: by showing progress in a dashboard and letting humans hit the final button, Perplexity sidesteps full liability while still saving you time.

The catch? Reliability. If an agent misreads seat availability or bungles an email draft, power users will bounce right back to manual workflows. With The Browser Company’s Dia launching and OpenAI reportedly prepping its own browser, Perplexity had to open the floodgates now to claim screen real estate before the titans arrive.