Perplexity is riding a wave of astonishing momentum.
The company’s chief executive, Aravind Srinivas, revealed on Thursday that the AI-powered search service handled a massive 780 million queries in May. That’s more than double-digit percentage growth every month, a curve most startups would envy.
A year ago, Perplexity registered just three thousand queries in one day. Now, it is fielding thirty million daily. If this keeps up, Srinivas expects the platform could approach a billion searches every single week within a year.
He credits this pace to what he touts as a dramatic shift in how people engage with information online. Not content to stop at just a feature-packed AI search, Perplexity is also developing its own browser.
Why Perplexity Believes Browsers Need Reinventing
Comet, their upcoming browser, is designed to do more than surf the web. Srinivas says Perplexity envisions it as something closer to a “cognitive operating system,” a tool that lives alongside you both for work and daily life.
He argues that the current generation of browsers simply does not keep pace with how much our lives are now online. More than just providing answers, AI can actually execute tasks behind the scenes.
For users, the promise is startlingly different. Instead of clicking through endless tabs and search results, you could prompt the system once and have an entire browsing session accomplished automatically.
Srinivas believes that this experience, if executed well, would not only tighten user retention but also draw in people tired of the traditional players, especially browser giants like Chrome.
Comet is not intended to compete as just another browser on your desktop. The company wants to reimagine how a browser works at its core, blending computing across different devices for seamless interaction.
This deeper integration could also provide valuable data to Perplexity. Tracking user activity outside the boundaries of a single app, the company wants to tap new revenue streams such as premium ads, similar to strategies that helped turn Google into an internet powerhouse.
What stands out is how Srinivas frames the mission. People no longer simply browse; much of modern life takes place inside the web. So if AI is to feel personal and proactive, it must be a companion that lives there too.
Actual details about Comet’s features remain closely guarded. The browser is due to launch within the next few weeks, but Perplexity is careful not to reveal specifics just yet.
With the pace of Perplexity’s growth and the ambition backing its next steps, the search for a better browsing experience might soon look very different, and some industry observers have also noted its approach to advertising future with browser data.
