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2h ago

Perplexity Launches Comet Plus to Share AI Search Revenue With Publishers

The $5 Comet Plus tier creates a $42.5 million pool with an 80% payout to publishers during escalating lawsuits over AI use of news.

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Perplexity, led by CEO Aravind Srinivas, is building Comet—an AI search engine to compete with Google.
Perplexity AI, headed by co-founder Aravind Srinivas, challenges Google in the online search market, but the internet giant is busy packing its own offerings with AI features
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Overview

  • Publishers will earn payments when their work drives traffic in the Comet browser, appears in Comet search results, or is used by Comet’s AI assistant to complete tasks.
  • Comet Plus costs $5 per month, allocates 80% of revenue to participating publishers, and reserves the remaining 20% for compute, with an initial $42.5 million payout pool that the company says will grow.
  • Perplexity has not named participating outlets but says it is in talks with prior partners after earlier ad-revenue pilots with Time, the Los Angeles Times, and Fortune.
  • Legal pressure is intensifying after a court rejected Perplexity’s bid to dismiss News Corp’s suit, while Forbes and Condé Nast have accused the startup of unauthorized use of their content.
  • Cloudflare alleges Perplexity circumvented site protections to pull data; Perplexity disputes that characterization, saying its assistant accesses pages at a user’s request, as the company touts fresh funding of $100 million at an $18 billion valuation and a public bid for Google’s Chrome.